Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

How to evolve? Read my book Prometheus Rising, and do all the exercises in that. There are a lot of exercises. It will keep you busy for at least a year. And if at the end of that year you haven't evolved, write me a letter of complaint, and I'll try to write a better book.

All kinds of maps or models also show, on examination, the personality or mental furniture of their creator, and, to a lesser extent, of the creator's society and linguistic system(s) — the semantic environment.

Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication between non-equals is warped and distorted by second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating communication jam and a Game Without End.

Van Gogh could see 28 shades of black. Why?

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed brutally realistic then, now seems a little quaint and unreal in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call model agnosticism, not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.

The fruit is orange, to ordinary perception. The fruit is not orange, to Galileo's analysis. The fruit is both orange and not-orange, to those who recognize that the existential and the scientific grids each have a kind of validity. The fruit is neither orange nor not-orange, to those who recognize that all grids are human inventions.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences. —Nietzsche, Human, AU-Too-Human

The origin of heroin – and of morphine; and laudanum, Edgar Allan Poe's habit; and pantopon, the drug popular in addict society back in the 1920s; and Demerol, Hermann Goering's happiness pills; and paregoric; and the codeine that Sherlock Holmes used to cool down his cocaine habit – is the opium poppy. This is probably the most accursed and hated plant in the world, and has been creating addicts in both the East and the West since the dawn of civilization.

The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle ages who lacked the capacity to "see" witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous to see what is objectively happening.

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate.

We have already explained that, of course — even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Besides, it was only coincidence. (Remember that phrase. It is the self-hypnotic chant by which the New Inquisition banishes all evidence it does not like. We will hear it often.)

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

Since the criminal mentality derives from such hypnosis by a Real Universe and the helplessness and rage induced by such metaphors, the criminal becomes, more and more, the typical person of our age. When the Real Universe becomes politicized — when the hypnotic model is based on Us-versus-Them Aristotelian logic — the criminal graduates into the Terrorist, another increasingly typical product of the materialist era.

The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.*

But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom — the conscious activities of perception and evaluation — is demanded of the Power Elite, the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.

The real fun of conspiracy hunting comes when you realize you can't trust anyone, as all the paranoids know.

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in — the last stage before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

EMIC REALITY: the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions that organizes our inchoate experience into meaningful patterns; the paradigm or model that people create by talking to each other, or by communicating in any symbolism; the culture of a time and place; the semantic environment. Every emic reality has its own structure, which imposes structure upon raw experience.

Precisely. Every religion is a way of arriving at a certain state of consciousness and every society is based on a particular religion. Naturally, since any state of consciousness can be induced by a specific drug or group of drugs, you are going to find each society accepting certain drugs and bitterly condemning others.

For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerrilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing.