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
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.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that understanding and growth are often achieved through introspection and recognizing interconnectedness.
Robert Anton Wilson's quote explores the paradoxical nature of existence and knowledge, emphasizing that progress and understanding often come from revisiting past experiences and looking within ourselves. It invites contemplation on the idea that external experiences and internal realities are deeply interconnected, suggesting that the journey inward can reveal insights that influence our outward paths, and vice versa.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about life and understanding, this quote can encourage deeper reflection.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
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.
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.
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.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
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).
The most important problems we face are complex, and require sustained attention. But we don't speak in terms of nuance or complexity. Is that by accident? It's because our minds have been entrained to expect shorter and shorter bite-sized bits.
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.
We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
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