Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism.

To summarize: CSICOP published a scientifically false report. They blocked all attempts by a member of their own Executive Council to inform members that the report was false. When their own selected referees agreed the report was false, they suppressed the referees' report. This went on over a period of four years (1977-1981) and if bungling explains the beginning of it, Rawlins's term cover-up certainly does not seem too strong for what followed.

The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing. The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

In short, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh want to sell us the oldest of all millennial legends: the True King will return soon, very soon, and cast out the usurpers. They even claim that this archetypal myth occurs in all European countries because the Priory planted it, to prepare us for the day when the seed of Jesus sits in judgment on all nations.

The socio-sexual circuit is activated and imprinted at adolescence, when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus. The teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new neural circuit oriented to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The pubescent human, like any other rutting animal, lurches about in a state of mating frenzy, every call gasping for the sexual object.

Who is the Master who makes the grass green? (Zen koan)

Prof. Marcello Truzzi, sociologist, from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called the Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn't skeptical at all in the true meaning of that word but is an advocacy body upholding orthodox establishment views. In other words, their alleged skepticism has become, as my paradox suggests, just another dogmatic blind faith.

This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. Nothing is real and everything is real as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.

SYNERGY: those behaviors of whole systems which cannot be predicted by analysis of parts or sub-systems. A term popularized by Buckminster Fuller and roughly equivalent to Holism. Cf. Gestalt in psychology and transaction immediately following:

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

Primitives (so-called) know these facts and surround all the points of imprint vulnerability with rituals, "ordeals," "rites of passage," etc. well designed to imprint the desired traits of a well-integrated member of that tribe at that time. Relics of these imprint ceremonies survive in Baptism, Confirmation, Bar Mitzvahs, Marriage Ceremonies, the Masonic "raising," etc.

TRANSACTION: used here in the sense of Transactional Psychology, which holds that perception is not passive re-action but active, creative trans-action, and that the observer and the observed must be considered a synergetic whole.

We are all walled cities shouting at each other over the armaments of our preconceptions.

Always reward the bringers of information, whether the news is good or bad: that was one of his basic rules.

And so on, ad infinitum. To account for our perception of our perception — our ability to perceive that we perceive — we have three heads, and to account for that, four heads, and to account for our ability to carry this analysis onward forever, we have infinite heads . . . A

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

If you look at your watch, realize you still don't know the time, and look again, were you strictly speaking awake the first time you looked?

Most anecdotal evidence concerns ESP between members of the same family. I find that very significant. It obviously has something to do with physical contact. A hell of a lot of ESP involves mothers and children. They were once part of her body. Thet seems to me to fit right in with Bell's theorem: the idea that things once connected remain always in contact even though they are separated.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.

I feel great and I send fraternal greetings to Dr. Andrei Sakharov in Russia," said Dr. Leary on emerging from prison, registering the fact that the mechanisms of the police state are the same everywhere, as are the myths that protect them. "Good Russians" believed Dr. Sakharov was a half-crazed alcoholic, just as "Good Americans" believed Dr. Leary was a half-crazed dope-fiend.

And of course, this is the traditional theme in romantic poetry. I'm very science oriented in many ways. So much so that a lot of people who hate science dislike my books because they dislike the scientific emphasis. But, at the same time I am science oriented, I don't reject other modes of knowledge. When I find something repeated over and over, my thought is, if enough people have thought this over for many centuries, it's worth looking at no matter how wild it sounds.

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.