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
We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.
Interpretation
The essence of enlightenment and understanding lies within us, rather than in external pursuits.
Robert Anton Wilson's quote emphasizes that the key to profound understanding and enlightenment is not found in external sources or mystical pursuits, such as the Philosopher's Stone or divine concepts, but rather within our own human experience and nervous system. It suggests that enlightenment is inherent in our nature and can be realized through introspection and self-awareness.
In practice
During a meditation workshop discussing self-discovery.
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).
We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.
I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
Death in itself is nothing; but we fear to be we know not what, we know not where.
The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.
The ocean of Spirit has become the little bubble of my soul. Whether floating in birth, or disappearing in death, in the ocean of cosmic awareness the bubble of my life cannot die. I am indestructible consciousness, protected in the bosom of Spirit’s immortality.
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