Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

The only thing that is fundamental (real) is consciousness itself; all else is virtual- i.e., a result of an exchange of information within consciousness.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

Information is not culture. In the mind of a truly educated person, facts are organized, and they make up a living world in the image of the world of reality.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

The quality of your thinking is largely determined by the quantity of the information you have with which to work

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

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.

The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.

I believe framing reality is one of the only ways we can ever be sure it actually exists. In that regard, I feel as though I'm still learning who I am as an artist.

I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil ? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it ? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.

It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality.

The realm of quanta is how I have intrinsically approached and viewed reality since I was born.

Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

I'd just say that truth is power and vice versa.

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.