Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat."

"Now the argument is maybe my perceptions are inaccurate but somewhere there is accuracy. The scientists have it with their instruments. That?s how we can find out what?s really real. But relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you are using and where that instrument is located in space-time."

"Of course there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?"

"Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad, but not ill."

"Once I broke loose from the employee role and became self-supporting as a writer, the ?horrors of capitalism? seemed less ghoulish to me, since I no longer had to face them every day. I became philosophical, like all persons free of acute suffering"

"On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break."

"Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola, and Live Oak, we don't get too confused, because, remember, we invented the lines on the map. Quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people believe we didn't invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all. But when you remember that we invented all of the boundaries, borders and lines, just like the Berlin Wall, then quantum mechanics is no more mysterious than the fact that I live in three places at the same time."

"Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses ? our reality-tunnels ? will become. Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information ? that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan."

"Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it."

"Only the madman is absolutely sure."

"Paleopuritanism and Neopuritanism... As psychologist Theodore Schroeder pointed out, "obscenity" is the modern form of "black magic." Both concepts are operationally meaningless; there is no instrument which, pointed at a book or painting, will tell how much "black magic" or "obscenity" is in it. These things are in the nervous system of the observer. Attributing them to books, art, ideas, etc., in the external world, and seeking to punish the perpetrators, is the same kind of hallucination that produced the witch-hunts in which nine million innocents were killed. Clarification of this issue explains what the Buddhists mean by "maya." One could lead a group of both old Puritans and new Puritans through a gallery featuring photographs of flowers without any problem arising, even though flowers are the genitals of plants, as everyone who passed Botany 101 knows. However, try to navigate that group through an exhibit of photos of animal genitalia and almost anything could happen, when the emotional imprints are activated. The external stimuli (natural sexuality) are the same, but the imprints are different. Contemplation of this parable should clarify what Buddha meant in saying that most people see only their own "maya" and never experience objective fact at all. Of course, if the exhibit featured human genitalia... a great deal of angry speech about "smut" from the first group and "sexism" from the second would be heard. All of this speech would confuse the internal glandular-emotional emergency imprint with the objective external stimuli, and there would be a desire to punish the photographer."

"Once you get used to thinking in terms of whether we're tuned in or not tuned in, then all of the problems in philosophy about being and non-being and so on, seem absolutely nonsensical. We don't know what is or what isn't, all we know is what we tuned in or what we didn't tune in. If you keep track of what you tuned in, that's what you can talk about meaningfully; what you didn't tune in, you can only make guesses about, or noises or garbles, or frantic hand gestures, but you can't really know anything about them, you only know what you've tuned in."

"Part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations."

"People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians? meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive."

"Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul."

"Pot-heads develop a certain inevitable alienation from society. They begin to feel like one-eyed men in The Kingdom of the Blind."

"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage, Celine went on. In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom?in anarchy?such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor?raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is?and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws?the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side?are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us, he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor."

"Reality is always plural and mutable."

"Reality is what you can get away with."

"Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue. When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation."

"Since I don?t have the Correct Answer, I don?t know which of these systems would work best in practice. I would like to see them all tried in different places, just to see what would happen. (This multiple Utopia system was also suggested by Silvio Gesell, who was not convinced he had a Correct Answer Machine; that?s another reason I like Gesell.) My own bias or hope or prejudice is that individualist-mutualist anarchism with some help from Bucky Fuller?s computers would work best of all, but I still lack the Faith to proclaim that as dogma."

"Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is truly relative only to the instrument you?re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which ?real? reality can be seen; we?re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels."

"Remember, we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn't invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all. But when you remember that we invented all the boundaries, borders and lines just like the Berlin Wall, then quantum mechanics is no more mysterious than the fact that I live in three places at the same time."

"So, ergo, any model we make does not describe the universe, it describes what our brains are capable of seeing at this time."

"Since theological propositions are scientifically meaningless, those of us of pragmatic disposition simply won't buy such dubious merchandise. . . Maybe -- remotely -- there might be something in such promotions, as there might be something in the talking dogs and the stocks in Arabian tapioca mines that W.C. Fields once sold in his comedies, but we suspect that we recognize a con game in operation. At least, we want to hear the dog talk or see the tapioca ore before we buy into such deals."

"Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs."

"So there is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen, we are all looking from the point of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we are all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. Or, the ones who don?t have the same reality tunnels as us do not seem ignorant or deliberately perverse or lying or hypnotized by some mad ideology. They just have a different reality tunnel, and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we are willing to listen."

"Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars -- you're all popes! You're all absolutely infallible. I have the authority to appoint anyone a Discordian Pope, because I'm a Discordian Pope. The first rule after you become a Discordian Pope is to excommunicate every Discordian Pope you meet. This is based on the basic Discordian principle that we Discordians must stick apart."

"Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars. You are all absolutely infallible. And don't take crap from anybody. Okay?"

"Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there?s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall."

"The A?A? must rank as the most secretive secret society in the world. Perhaps nobody, not even the few writers who have discussed it, knows for sure when the A?A? began, which group claiming to be the A?A? at present is the real A?A?, or even what the symbols A?A? stand for ? although many claim to know these things of course. ? Occult historians generally agree that V.V.V.V.V. signified Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici ("By the force of truth I have conquered the universe"), one of the eleven magic mottoes of Aleister Crowley."

"Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons."

"Tell me, Harry, what difference would it make if it wasn't real? Harry thought a moment, his chinless face sour. We wouldn't have to do what we think we have to do. But even if we don't have to do what we think we have to do, it won't make any difference if we do it Which means we should just go ahead. Mavis sighed. Just go ahead. Just go ahead, said Hagbard. A powerful mantra. And if we don't go ahead, said George, it doesn't matter either. Which means that we just do go ahead. Another powerful mantra, said Hagbard. Just do go ahead."

"The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear."

"The average American male reaches orgasm in one and a half minutes, and usually performed in a dark room, so that it ca be finished furtively before the sex-hating Christian God has time to notice what is going on."

"The basic technique of all my books. Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?'"

"The average is that which no person quite ever is."

"The brain is the greatest sex organ of all."

"The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now."

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."

"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization."

"The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal."

"The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization."

"The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity sweeping this planet are not just another civilization failing ? They are the birth-pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history."

"The fear of death is the beginning of slavery."

"The creative faculty, the god-power, is not used here with anything less than literalness. When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticelli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus, we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them."

"The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schoedinger's Cat."

"The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world."

"The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning."

"The function of public education consists of killing curiosity, encouraging docility, and preparing mindless drones to work for corporations."