Inspiration#00023 – Robert Anton Wilson (RAW)
As George Carlin said I have learned more from Robert Anton Wilson than I have from any other source.
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as “Bob”, was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews.
Wilson described his work as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth”. His goal being “to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.
If it was not for Robert Anton Wilson, I would not be the same person as I am today. Here are some of my favorite inspirational quotes from him:
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.)
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.
…reality is always plural and mutable.
“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
We’re trapped in linguistic constructs… all that is is metaphor.
Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.
― Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus RisingEvery ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snowflakes are identical – and, indeed, the smallest subatomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next – every card-index system is a self-delusion. Individuality is ignored when identity is asserted.
-Hagbard Celine(Robert Anton Wilson)
Watch amazing documentary “Maybe Logic: The Lives & Ideas Of Robert Anton Wilson” (2003) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7N6TOFyrLg
So So So important to experience Robert Anton Wilson. Kaboom
About five years ago I was standing at a bus stop reading Prometheus Rising (again), and a woman walked up to me and put a quarter on the ground at my feet. My mind was so blown that by the time I recovered, she was gone. I wish I could thank her for that.