My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the concept of freedom and the illusion of control by societal fears.
Robert Anton Wilson highlights that true freedom exists within the individual, suggesting that societal control is maintained through fear. He posits that if people could attain a state of enlightenment or deep meditation ('dhyana'), they would no longer be subjected to control by societal fears such as imprisonment or violence, thereby asserting that knowledge and awareness can dismantle oppressive structures.
Themes
FreedomFearControlSocietyDhyana
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about personal empowerment, this quote can remind individuals of their innate freedom.
More from Robert Anton Wilson
All quotes →I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Robert Anton WilsonRead
If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
Similar quotes
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
M. F. K. FisherRead
In the frantic search for an elusive 'cure,' few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?
Paul DaviesRead
I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.
Deepak ChopraRead
But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.
Alice WalkerRead
All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
H. L. MenckenRead
The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.
Thomas JeffersonRead