Quotes About Influence

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

I've learned a hell of a lot from [William S.] Burroughs. I think the best things in my books probably are inspired by Burroughs. I think about what Burroughs wrote and then I try to go one step further. And I may go one step back; I don't know.

It all rather reminds me of a remark once made to me by Alan Watts: The great error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire 'fell.' It never 'fell.' It still controls the Western world through the Vatican and the Mafia.

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.

NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions.

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

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.

Since the publication of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing mass hallucination or something like mass hallucination are well known to advertisers.

Well, then I started to find out that it wasn't all paranoid. The Illuminati really was a very influential organization in its time. I am extremely skeptical that it still exists. But it did play a much larger role in the 18th century than most conventional historians realize. The more you look at it, the more intriguing connections leap out at you.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

Some of this literature deserves at least a brief note. Madame Helena P. Blavatsky believed in a hollow Earth, and so did Lewis Spence. She formed the Theosophical Society and he, the AMORC Rosicrucians in San Jose, California (as distinguished from all the other Rosicrucians.) These two groups have so heavily influenced modem occultism that no amount of scientific evidence, now, can ever dislodge the hollow Earth from the Belief System (B.S.) of millions of Seekers of Higher Wisdom.

In sum, I don't believe the people who say that the world is controlled by one vile group of conspirators who are running everything, but I believe there are actually a multitude of conspiracies contending in the night.

You are mistaken, he said smoothly. That boy is not your son. He belongs to society and the State, and I am society and the State. I will take him anywhere I want, I will order him to do anything I care to have done, and I will shoot him if he disobeys.

Wilson emphasizes that this model describes not only many, many infamous criminals, but quite a few of the more infamous statesmen and churchmen of history, who were not called criminals only because they were powerful enough to define what was crime in their society. Since these types have a strong power drive, most of history, as Wilson sees it, is Criminal History, the record of the crimes of one type of male.

The conventional explanation of such seemingly aphrodisiac effects is autosuggestion. That is, the people in question knew what the drugs were supposed to do to them and, therefore, unconsciously programmed themselves for such effects.

Nobody knows who they were or what they were doing, but they left a legacy. — This Is Spinal Tap

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet – thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.* ~•~

So there we are. Aldous Huxley, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. John Lilly, philosopher Alan Watts and several other recent theorists have used this metaphor and this argument, usually without knowing that they were echoing Aleister Crowley.

The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist.

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

REALITY" IS THE TEMPORARY RESULTANT OF CONTINUOUS STRUGGLES BETWEEN RIVAL GANGS OF PROGRAMMERS.

General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.

language controls our thinking.