Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

The only conclusion that makes sense of this data, it seems to me, would hold that many powerful and/or "conspiratorial" groups that have different or even inimical goals can on occasion cooperate when they feel frightened enough of each other to think cooperation more profitable than gang war.

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

In fact, the emphasis on choice and creativity in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we create the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we choose.

If the Thinker thinks "holy water" from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will skillfully orchestrate all signals from the glands, muscles, organs etc. until they have organized themselves into good health again

What we are saying is that every conspiracy regards itself as an affinity group — men and women who share the same goals and work together well. When you and I do it, it is just an affinity group. When that gang over there does it, it is a damnable conspiracy.

Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It's just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

I also regard cocaine as pernicious because most of the profits from the coke industry go to enrich the Mafia, the Vatican and the worst dictators in South America. You can find the documentation to support this charge in David Yallop's In Gods Name, in Penny Lernoux's In Banks We Trust and in my own Everything Is Under Control.

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

Krishnamurti distinguishes between thinking, an active process, and thought, the result of past thinking filed away in the memory of the brain, or in a library or computer, etc. Thought contains all the wisdom, and much of the folly, of the past; it's a great labor-saving device. Why does Krishnamurti regard thought as profoundly dangerous and the enemy of thinking?

In fact, I only differ with them in not liking their intolerance, their fascist tactics, their introduction of Maoist brainwashing to our groves of Academe, their utter lack of humor, their continuous violations of ordinary common sense, their evident desire to destroy our Constitution and their lack of simple human decency. Aside from those minor issues, I almost approve the P.C. agenda.)

Somehow, in passing from abnormal temperatures to blue luminescence and haloes, we seem to have crossed a line, and, for most readers, skepticism is increasing. I wonder why that is? Is it possible that what I call the New Idol so dominates the modern world that even those who read a subversive book like this are still uneasy about becoming too blasphemous, too heretical?

Imagine a billiard table without players. Nobody hits any balls. No earthquake shakes the room. No magnet exists, hidden under the table. Yet suddenly Ball A at one end of the table turns clockwise and Ball B at the other end of the table turns counterclockwise.

Which column implies the medieval Aristotelian metaphysics (the essence theory) and which implies modern neurology and psychology (perception as the judgmental ACT of a perceiver)?

Remember: I am not asking you to believe these yarns at all. We know how much nonsense gets published these days, do we not? I am merely asking that you observe in yourself the strength and immediacy of the impulse to deny at once. Does this impulse vary according to the weight of the circumstantial evidence (such as it is) or according to how much your own imprinted and conditioned reality-tunnel is challenged?

Pure Reason, however, derives from axioms which can neither be proven nor disproven. These axioms appear in consciousness from a level of pre-logical apprehension in which we might as well be gesticulating and pointing — or waving sticks in the air like Zen Masters — instead of talking, because we are trying to indicate or invoke something that exists before words and categories.

If you told that to the Incredible Randi, he would insist some fraud or hoax existed. Yet such non-local correlations appear mathematically necessary to Quantum Mechanics and experiments have measured them repeatedly.

The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.

Consciousness is not a given, or a fact. Our mode of consciousness seems historically to have been determined by neurological (unconscious) habits. When we become aware of this, and struggle against the inertia of habit, consciousness continually mutates, becomes less particle-like and fixed, spreads like a flowing wave. It can move between the poles of pure in-DIVIDE-ualism and pure in-UNITE-ualism, and between many other poles, and can become increasingly creative and self-chosen.

I am interested only in the latter kind of occultism, and even there I am leery of the high nonsense quotient that infests most writings in this field. My aim has always been to learn what occult practices produce concrete results and to reformulate what I have reamed from occultists into scientific and experimental language, as far as that is possible at this date.

Yesterday a Gay Rights demonstration occurred in Washington. Naturally, the Expert police estimate of the crowd (300,000) falls far short of the estimates given by the Expert organizers (1,000,000 or more.) Even in counting heads, people "see" in accordance with pre-established programs.

Back in the Vietnam War days, I attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations and the police's crowd-count never agreed with the organizers' count. My own observations never gave me clear reason to believe anybody's estimate. I don't know how people judge the size of large crowds, or how they can use techniques they sincerely believe have "objectivity." Even in looking at spilled marbles, I think people estimate very subjectively.