Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Everybody you meet is an "artist" who has made a similar creation.

Is there some connection between waking up in the mystic sense, and learning to read (or to see paintings, say) in an alert, non-mechanical way? One Zen master, when asked what Zen is, always replied with the single word, Attention. What the hell did he mean?

To say that religion and priestcraft have played a conservative role in history is an understatement. One might as well say that bubonic plague has killed a few people, or that Hitler was a little bit strange. The chief role of religion has always been reactionary. This is its evolutionary function, in the dialectic of the circuitry of the brain.

If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as only appearances, or as misperceptions.

Try. Thoughts are the one phenomena still private in this world; they won't come around and arrest you at once. You have nothing to lose but mental chains. You might have a world of psychological freedom — creativity — to gain.

You see, the position of this book does not embrace what I call Fundamentalist Copenhagenism — the view that the Copenhagen model says the last word forever. Rather, I consider my position Liberal Copenhagenism. I do not believe any model equals the universe, or universes, but I think alternative models will continue to proliferate, because the data of modern science has grown so complex that many models will cover it.

Indeed, Lao-Tse's famous paradox, The largest is within the smallest only begins to make sense to an Occidental after she or he has understood what non-local information means in modern physics.

Of course, these are genetic/historical generalizations which do not precisely match any specific family. The gracious goddess/hostile giant archetypes are not activated in cases where the mother is cold, rejecting, embittered etc. and the father is the warm, supportive figure. The imprints on the first and second circuits are statistically deviant in such families and anything may result — a shaman, a schizophrenic, a genius, a homosexual, an artist, a psychologist, etc.

Some call this Liberal Copenhagenism model agnosticism. Dr. Marcello Truzzi calls it zeteticism.

language controls our thinking.

fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

Dr. Walker develops a mathematical model of this non-local Self and uses the model to derive predictions about how often the alleged psychokinesis of parapsychologists can occur. His results correlate with the scores made by persons very successful in psychokinesis experiments. In other words, people rated good at controlling the fall of dice, because they score above chance, score on the average only as far above chance at the non-local Hidden Variable model says they can.

Fifth-Circuit neurosomatic consciousness bleaches out all these problems at once. The disappearance of first-circuit physical" illnesses only seems more "miraculous" than the transcendence of second-circuit emotionalism, third-circuit perplexity and fourth-circuit guilt. It is the Cartesian mind/body dualism that makes us think of such first-circuit "physical" cures as somehow stranger or more spooky than any rapid improvement on the other circuits.

The unconscious Joyce represents is not merely an area within the brains of his creatures. It is a network of connections through time and space that extends beyond any awareness but the most absolute.

It is possible, and even probable, that nymphs and satyrs and such are only gods who have been apprehended without love-partially, obscurely, distortedly.

To think that I am not going to think of you anymore is still thinking of you. Let me then try not to think that I am not going to think of you.

In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as exciting. In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as dull. Is the excitement or dullness in the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?

A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

Liberalism, as in a "normal" Hollywood film, has triumphed over fascism, and we can all feel warm and fuzzy.

Endorphins are neurotransmitters that trigger Circuit V. They can be activated by cannabis drugs, psychedelics, meditation, pranayama, or visualization of white light. The last is the most common system used by "faith-healers" and was known to the medieval Rosicrucians.

Just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that contain and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form. The absent is everpresent, the dead are all alive, and the abyss of uncertainty appears in every multi-meaningful sentence. (This will be illustrated below.)

It is awkward to think that bacilli and other small organisms did not exist until we invented microscopes to see them, or that other galaxies did not exist until, in the 1920s, we invented telescopes powerful enough to detect them. Similarly, the past does not exist any longer for us, in ordinary perception, but it exists — and so does the future — in the geometry of Minkowski's space-time continuum.

1Nobody knows why at present, but paranormal events seem much more likely at 4 hertz than at any other brainwave frequency.

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.