Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Language structures demark our reality-tunnels. I mentioned that earlier, but it needs repeating.

Time is in-form-ation. Fuller simplifies Einstein into a one-sentence poem: Matter is knots in energy. Matter is interference patterns. All radiations travel in geodesics, due to gravity which curves their trajectories. Where these trajectories cross, interference results: knots in energy, perceived by us as matter. The world of matter is the tuned-in. The not-yet-tuned-in is not not, it is merely not knot. Dig?

Colin Wilson argues that when we say, Life is boring and meaningless, it means that we are boring and meaningless. Can there be any truth in this?

What is not-tuned-in by the best scientific instruments of 1986 may easily be tuned-in in 1987, for all we know.

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

And does it not appear that virtual selves and virtual realities have infiltrated both psychology and physics because, as this book claims, all sufficiently advanced analysis must eventually abandon Aristotelian certitude and accept models — reality tunnels — based on probabilities?

It is necessary to note that some cults presently active on this backward planet go even further than that and engage in neurosomatic brainwashing.

It only takes a few weeks in prison to become "a convict," whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a few weeks in the Army to become a "soldier.

Perhaps, in the year 2598, some historians will claim that there never were "hippies," while others will claim that hippies existed but didn't actually smoke marijuana, and a third group will insist that the hippies, always stoned out of the skulls on belladonna, ran through the streets attacking innocent bystanders.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.

The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly.

I also employ the scatter technique of Sufi writers. Topics do not always appear in linear, logical order, but in a non-linear psycho-logical order calculated to produce new ways of thinking and perceiving. This technique also intends to assist the process of internalization.

Mr. White believes that these are objective predictions based on eternal "laws" of karma which he learned from various occultists and gurus. He does not believe that the apocalyptical reality-tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

The human mind is ingenious enough to prove or disprove any proposition, to its own satisfaction

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners . . .

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.

This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems. Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left . . .

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

To state our major thesis again in different words, Uncertainty, Indeterminacy and Relativity appear in modern science for the same reason they appear in modern logic, modern art, modern literature, modern philosophy and even modern theology. In this century, the human nervous system has discovered its own creativity, and its own limitations.

The peoples of the earth are islands," said the late Clement Atlee, "shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding." Each island is a separate reality-tunnel created by (a) our culture, (b) our sub-culture and (c) by the myth-maker or artist in each of us who is the adamantine individuality that makes you and me unique human selves, not replicable units like the ants in a hive.

Fundamentalist science is similar to other fundamentalisms. Lacking humor, charity and some measure of self-doubt, it behaves intolerantly, fanatically and savagely to all heretics. Eventually, like all closed ideological systems, it becomes comical and overtly ridiculous — and that shall be my main demonstration.