RAW Quotes

Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective.
(from Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview by Jeffrey Elliot)

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

A poll taking by the wallstreet journal and the ny times and the christian science monitor, together they showed that 75 percent of the public doesnn't believe what they read in the newspapers anymore, the percentage who don't believe what they see on tv news is even higher, it's like 85 percent. We all know the bastards are lying to us and they get away with it because people are used to yes or no, every 4 years to give us the sense that democracy still exists they give us 2 goddamn motherfucking liars, I like shakespearian english, down to earth english that describes what I'm talking about. I don't like prissy little euphemisms, so they give us 2 goddamn motherfucking lying bastards sons of bitches and they say choose between them you are free, you can have a choice, which lying bastard do you prefer to the other lying bastard?

It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become. Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.
(Quantum Psychology)

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine)

"Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine)

Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.
(The I in the Triangle, speech held at a bookstore in Santa Cruz, California (1990))

The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by M. Gabriel Sartines)

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and progress, everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, Disobedience was man's Original Virtue. -

I didn't know what I saw -- swamp gas, space ship, sundog, weather balloon. What impressed me was my parents' fear of reporting the sighting. I realized that even in our allegedly rational age many things remain unspeakable -- damned, blasphemous. George Carlin can't do his comedy on networks because the comedy depends on taboo words. We remain governed by taboo to an astounding extent.

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world

The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statistician, psychologist, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of 'monopoly in the means of production.'

The creative faculty, the god-power, is not used here with anything less than literalness. When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticeli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus, we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them.
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine)

The difference between a cult and a religion is the number of members and the size of the bank account.

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.
(Prometheus Rising)

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you've lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.

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 longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

The average is that which no person quite ever is.

The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually — because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy is that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is 'the Lie that all men believe.'
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine) Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size...)

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy’s britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door.

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

A true initiation never ends.

Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.
(The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Luigi Duccio)

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence,
the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.).

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.

If everybody used the word maybe more often, this world could become stark staring sane.

I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. "Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance!" just doesn't cut it….
(This quote could be lifted from Bill Hicks' comedy routine.)

People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present,
over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians - meaningless propositions
that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.

The Cosmic Schmuck law holds that [1] the more often you suspect you may be thinking or acting like a Cosmic Schmuck, the less of a Cosmic Schmuck you will become, year by year, and [2] if you never suspect you might think or act like a Cosmic Schmuck, you will remain a Cosmic Schmuck for life.

A sense of humor results from perspective. The wider the perspective, the more humor you will perceive.

Interviewer: If there were Aliens what do you think they would be up to humankind-wise?
Robert Anton Wilson: Any aliens aware of humanity would probably find us cute but possibly dangerous - sort of like I feel about polar bears. Or maybe that represents projection on my part - I find most humans cute but dangerous, not as cute as the bears but much more dangerous.

'Seeing' is not a function of the eyes alone, but of the eyes-and-brain working together. A popular proverb says, 'Seeing is believing,' but as the philosopher Santayana once pointed out, humans are much better at believing than at seeing.

I'm sorry. There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and
thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.

The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational!

The world situation today is quite like two gangs of lunatics who are fighting and trying to murder each other over possession of a glass of water, in the middle of a rainstorm.

A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND: IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING!

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.

When the bio-survival circuit flashes danger, all other mental activity ceases.

The cortex itself is so recent in evolution that it is often called 'the new brain'; it is found only in the higher mammals
and is most developed in humans and cetaceans (dolphins and whales).

My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being "frightened atheists," that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government.
(Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview by Jeffrey Elliot)

"Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently.
Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability
to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals;
censorship blocks transmission."

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet,
it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology
(Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking."

"We can all see how other people's BS (belief system or bullshit :p) makes them blind and "stupid" at times, but we find it very hard to notice how our own BS is doing the same to us. This is what anthropologists call 'acculturalization.' Following Gurdjieff, I prefer to call it hypnosis... Every politician knows how to induce hypnosis, and very damned few people on the whole planet know how to de-hypnotize themselves. The world is not governed by facts or logic. It is governed by BS (belief systems)."

1. Never believe totally in anybody else's BS.
2. Never believe totally in your own BS.

"A sense of humor results from perspective. The wider the perspective, the more humor you will perceive."

"'Seeing' is not a function of the eyes alone, but of the eyes-and-brain working together. A popular proverb says, 'Seeing is believing,' but as the philosopher Santayana once pointed out, humans are much better at believing than at seeing."

"Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort,
or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence."

"In (Gordiano) Bruno's day the 3 terms were divided up differently, you had science and mysticism on one side, and religion on the other side. Science and mysticism are alike in their struggle against religion. They were both based on experience and respect for the individual. The idea of science and mysticism was go out and discover for yourself. Find out what works, find out how the universe is actually structured and how you relate to the structure of the universe. And so there were basically 2 areas of scientific exploration, the external and the internal. But they were both pursued by the same method, the experimental method."

"All around one the True Believers trudge by, mouths grim, brows furrowed, ulcers and worse eating at their innards. This desperate company of oddfellows (Thoreau) live in what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance.' Because their reality-maps are, one and all, too small to cover the vast, eerie, amusing world in which we live, they are perpetually frustrated: the world does not live up to their fixed beliefs. They are all convinced that there is something radically wrong with the universe itself, or with the rest of humanity, and they never suspect that the real trouble is in their own rigid and robotic nervous systems."

"Robert Anton Wilson describes himself as a 'guerrilla ontologist,' signifying his intent to attack language and knowledge the way terrorists attack their targets: to jump out from the shadows for an unprovoked attack, then slink back and hide behind a hearty belly laugh."
Robert Sheaffer