6
" In fact, I would say this particular generation gap might almost be called chemical warfare – the pot-heads versus the booze-heads. Actually, though, it would be more accurate to call it religious warfare – but only the pot-heads realize that there is a religious issue at stake . . . Drugs have always been considered either sacred or diabolical. The background of drug use in history involves charms, magic potions, holy sacraments and Devil’s orgies. In more advanced societies, the same cluster of ideas carries over into our modern distinctions between legal intoxicants, which are good, and illegal dope, which is bad. But that is purely a matter of social definition. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
7
" In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only “offense” of which the Weavers were guilty. They didn’t annoy their neighbors and they didn’t plot an insurrection against the government: they just tried to avoid and evade it. This alone was too much for the Feds. They sent in an informant to make friends with Randy and eventually entrap him into selling a shotgun. With that excuse, the FBI and ATF made war on the Weaver family, killing Vicki while she stood holding her baby in her arms, killing the older son, and even killing the family dog.* "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
9
" It is necessary to emphasize that DeQuincey, Coleridge and Cocteau were exceptionally talented (and exceptionally disturbed) individuals. In DeQuincey’s case, furthermore, the extravagant and glorious visions he describes were all experienced, as Dr. Robert DeRopp notes, “between sleeping and waking,” when all talented people, even without opium, can project their imaginations most vividly. (This is technically known as hypnagogic hallucination, needs no drugs and is practiced as a method of mind expansion by some occult schools, such as Louis Culling’s “Great Body of God.”) For the majority of opium addicts whose medical records exist, no such psychedelic effects are recorded, and most of them have the same depressed or soporific experiences as morphine or heroin addicts. In short, if you are looking for psychedelic effects, use the real psychedelics; unless you’re an artist of DeQuincey’s or Coleridge’s stature, you are very unlikely to find them on opium. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
10
" Man needs dreams, as recent sleep research has well-documented. If you wake people up each time they start to dream (which is revealed by their rapid eye movements, which has led scientists to speak of REM sleep, meaning sleep with rapid eye movements and dreams), they will, within a few nights, become neurotic, irritable and slightly paranoid. No reputable researcher has continued this experiment for more than a few nights, because the evidence indicates real risk that the subjects might actually go totally mad. It doesn’t matter how much sleep they have had; if they aren’t able to dream, the same neurotic and near-psychotic behavior will appear. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
11
" In this holy war, I write as a war correspondent, awash in a deluge of propaganda from both sides. I have tried to gather the most accurate information available on the actual effects of various drugs on sexual drive and sexual performance. Since we are concerned here with a theological and legal conflict as well as a scientific field for investigation, there is little consensus. Trying to find out what a drug really does to the human mind and body, in America today, is like trying to find out who shot first at Waco or Ruby Ridge. “Only God knows for sure, and He isn’t telling.” All that the objective reporter can do, then, is to print the claims of both sides and let the reader decide for himself who can be trusted. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
13
" By the same token, it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps people really do need religious experiences, whatever such experiences consist of. It is well-established, in LaBarre’s Ghost Dance, that a large number of people think they need such experience, and actively seek after it, whenever society faces a crisis that it cannot rationally understand. An earthquake alone will not necessarily trigger such a response, because an earthquake can be explained, more or less, within some traditional framework of ideas. But when the gods are mocked by missionaries of false and foreign gods, and take no revenge; when the sacred taboos are violated on all sides, and the gods still do not respond; when military defeats and other disasters occur in this perplexing context; when a man’s children are sold into slavery or his wife forcibly enwhored by the conquerors – then, some extraordinary explanation is needed, and it is at this point in time that the vision quest begins. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
15
" It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
16
" Life is one, but consciousness is divided. That is, all of our unconscious bodily functions, such as breathing, digestion, the beating of our hearts, the biochemistry of our metabolism, and so on, are part of a seamless web that does, indeed, include the whole universe. More locally, we are cells in an explosion of protoplasm on this planet that began 3 billion years ago. (This is the key to Dr. Leary’s cryptic epigram, “Your body is 3 billion years old.”) The “body of Buddha,” as Buddhists call it, is, at any moment, in cybernetic contact with each of its parts. This does not involve anything spooky or metaphysical; what I have in mind can be illustrated by the experience of Dr. Ross Ashby, who tried to build an analog computer that would be a model of a generalized animal organism. Dr. Ashby found that such a machine could no more be designed than one could divide by zero in mathematics. It cannot be designed because the feedbacks, the information Bow channels, are not all inside the animal; many are in “the environment.” Dr. Ashby ended by designing his “homeostat,” widely used in biology and cybernetics classes. This is not a model of an animal; it is a model of an-animal-in-an-environment. "
― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick
