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Quotes About Reality

as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events". NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
1. We can say it is waves. 2. We can say it is particles. 3. We can say it is both waves and particles, i.e. either of the first two will serve, at different times. 4. We can say It is neither waves nor particles, i.e. the models are our metaphors; the Etic non-verbal event remains — unspeakable.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Moral: Hang on to your Elmyrs, folks. They, too, may become Historical Curiosities. And remember: a counterfeit dollar, hung in a museum as found art by Andy Warhol, will have a value in the hundreds of thousands, whereas a "real" dollar, blessed by the Wizards in the Federal Reserve, will retain its meager face value until inflation reduces it even further.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .
~ Robert Anton Wilson
In Buddhist Logic, then: Social fields are real. Social fields are not real. Social fields are both real and not-real. Social fields are neither real nor not-real.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
A field that depends on what people believe is unthinkable to a Fundamentalist Materialist, but social studies seems to need such fields.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a "map" (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations. These "maps" may be paintings, blueprints, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, music, etc.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
I think it might help to regard this UFO, not as an external event () or a human hallucination () but as the synergetic product () of event-plus-human-interpretation.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men become giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose the lesser of two evils, and accept congenial hallucination, rather than — Chaos and the Abyss.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The tendency to split etiological factors of disease into psychic or somatic components, though heuristic for many purposes, nevertheless perpetuates, at least implicitly, a mind-body dualism that has defied rational solution for centuries. Perhaps what we need is a new formulation of this ancient problem, one that does not propose a formidable gap between the separate realities of mind and body . . .
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
It is even more amusing to remember that an orange is really sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue — blue is conducted through its skin. We see orange precisely because there is no orange in the fruit — because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The substance or isness of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of "is" and "all" and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
I am merely suggesting, playfully at times, maybe seriously at other times, that Universe is a bit more complicated than anybody's models; and that using several reality-tunnels — as in Po or quantum mechanics — may show a great many interesting correlations and details and exciting and beautiful aspects that we will never see if we look always and only through one monotonous reality-tunnel which we have made into an Idol.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Kind of makes me wonder. George Lucas, as noted earlier, could fake this on film, but I don't know of any existing technology that would fake it in several parts of a "real," "solid" town.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The perspective of anthropology and of ethnomethodology, and of this book, is like the perspective of a cosmopolitan art critic. It asks us to try many reality-windows instead of standing hypnotized at our habitual window all our lives.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?
~ Robert Anton Wilson
But in considering the above experiments, I feel we need to accept some sort of post-modernism, or at least some of the "neurological relativism" I preach in all my books. The instrument that measures all other instruments — the human nervous system — has its own laws, and one of them involves always seeing the results one wants to see until and unless something really startles the brain enough to reframe its experiences.
~ Robert Anton Wilson