Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death QUOTES

1 " The real fun of conspiracy hunting comes when you realize you can’t trust anyone, as all the paranoids know. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

2 " For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerrilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

3 " Several chapters back, you may remember, we mentioned Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel With Science by Gross and Levitt. This book claims for current mainstream science what only religious zealots have previously claimed for their faiths, namely that in a certain correlation of formulas (ideas contain no more than that) humans have created a True Picture of Reality (All Reality) which we should adore in humility and never dare to doubt or to question. As regular readers of my works know, I refer to that kind of faith, whether in religion or science (or philosophy . . .) as Idolatry, because it asks us to worship a representation of the experiential world, and I do not think representations or maps (or masks) make satisfactory objects of worship. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

4 " However, the position of my books, and of post-modernism in general, which regards all representations, or maps, or models, as probabilistic and relative to their social context, Gross and Levitt dismissively call “perspectivism” (a good word in my estimation, so I cheerfully accept it). Gross and Levitt see perspectivism as an insidious threat to their One True Faith and a pathway downward to the bottomless abyss of nihilism. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

5 " * Malraux invented the term and concept of the “museum without walls,” which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

6 " In short, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh want to sell us the oldest of all millennial legends: the True King will return soon, very soon, and cast out the usurpers. They even claim that this archetypal myth occurs in all European countries because the Priory planted it, to prepare us for the day when the seed of Jesus sits in judgment on all nations. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

7 " The only conclusion that makes sense of this data, it seems to me, would hold that many powerful and/or “conspiratorial” groups that have different or even inimical goals can on occasion cooperate when they feel frightened enough of each other to think cooperation more profitable than gang war. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

8 " (In fact, I only differ with them in not liking their intolerance, their fascist tactics, their introduction of Maoist brainwashing to our groves of Academe, their utter lack of humor, their continuous violations of ordinary common sense, their evident desire to destroy our Constitution and their lack of simple human decency. Aside from those minor issues, I almost approve the P.C. agenda.) "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

9 " Yesterday a Gay Rights demonstration occurred in Washington. Naturally, the Expert police estimate of the crowd (300,000) falls far short of the estimates given by the Expert organizers (1,000,000 or more.) Even in counting heads, people “see” in accordance with pre-established programs. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

10 " Back in the Vietnam War days, I attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations and the police’s crowd-count never agreed with the organizers’ count. My own observations never gave me clear reason to believe anybody’s estimate. I don’t know how people judge the size of large crowds, or how they can use techniques they sincerely believe have “objectivity.” Even in looking at spilled marbles, I think people estimate very subjectively. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

11 " Gay Pride puzzles me even more than counting the dots in a blur. In my own naive way, I don’t understand why some people feel they have to announce, in public, that they feel proud of their sexuality. In my simple mind, sex seems a hell of a lot of fun, and often includes deep emotion, even “religious” emotion, but has never provoked the kind of pride that one has for straight A’s on a report card, or a Nobel prize, say. Sexual “pride” makes me think of young boys bragging to each other in a locker room — and usually lying their heads off about their “conquests. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

12 " As a multi-culturalist, I play no favorites. In one sense we have evolved 72 years beyond the Christ cult, and in another sense we have evolved 90 years. As Sri Syadasti said, “All systems are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.” (A secret Illuminati teaching holds that if you repeat that 666 times you will achieve Total Illumination, in some sense.) "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

13 " You already know the Gregorian calendar. It gets drummed into our heads in our allegedly “secular” “public” schools and everybody in our society who holds Power (banks, corporations, even governments) uses it. My system intends to break the conditioning/hypnosis created by this artificial uniformity. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

14 " If we dared to proclaim Straight Pride, we would immediately get accused of homophobia — although the Gay Pride people, most curiously, never, never get accused of heterophobia. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

15 " Of course, my basic motive in trying to popularize this system lies in the hope that some people will use it and get cured of asking “But which is the real date?” Then they might start to see the fallacy of all questions in that form and we will achieve a large part of the goals of General Semantics, Erisianism, Deconstructionism and Buddhism. Some may even understand why no form of “is” or “be” appears anywhere in this book (except when I quote somebody else.) "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

16 " Once you have given up asking “what day is it?” you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really “is.” Then, in Melville’s fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don’t believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil’s masquerade. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

17 " In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

18 " If we consider Clifford Irving’s Fake! a fake itself — a fake biography of a fake painter, revealing only what the faker, or fakers, care to reveal, and dumping a great deal of disinformation on us in the process — then we must regard Orson Welles’ F For Fake as a fake movie about a fake biography of a fake painter. But perhaps we would more accurately dub it a fake documentary about the impossibility of ever making a “true” documentary. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

19 " (Post-modernism, in art and theory, evolved out of the linguistic analysis of recent semantic/semiotic philosophers, who have discovered that [1] any system of words or concepts covers part, but not all, of human experience, and that [2] social factors play a role in which systems dominate at a given time. The opposition consists mostly of Christian theologians like Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, who claim the total truth remains accessible to us through Faith in the Christian mythos. More recently two blokes named Gross and Levitt, in a curious book called Higher Superstition, repeat most of the Maritainish and Lewisoid arguments for Faith in Authority and rejection of relativistic skepticism — except that Gross and Levitt believe that current mainstream science, not mainstream Christianity, contains the repository of Total Truth which skepticism should never question. More about those extremely odd birds later.) "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

20 " Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death