Cosmic Trigger 3 Quotes

“The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the “tickets” or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Researchers don’t do certain kinds of research because they don’t want to get thrown into San Quentin, as happened to Dr. Leary.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“However, I do find myself in sympathy with academic postmodernism on the issue that arouses the most rage in Gross and Levitt — the existence of social forces that shape the scientific models of a given time and place. I do not say that social forces create scientific theories — an idea as absurd as the academic post-modernists’ notion that social forces wrote King Lear — but social forces, I think, clearly play a role in determining which masks (scientific, artistic or philosophical) predominate, at least in a given decade, sometimes for a given generation, sometimes for even longer.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“The Cosmic Schmuck Law, as stated in several of my books, holds that if you occasionally notice that you have said something or done something that qualifies as Cosmic Schmuckery, you might become, in time, less of a Cosmic Schmuck; but if you never notice any Cosmic Schmuckery in your own thinking/doing, you will become more and more of a Cosmic Schmuck every year.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“These thingamajigs act like waves part of the time and like particles part of the time. This basic paradox has remained all through the 94 years of development of quantum mechanics and gives great comfort to those of us who believe no one model or perspective ever shows all the truth or the only truth about anything. For further details see my book, Quantum Psychology.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Moral: Hang on to your Elmyrs, folks. They, too, may become Historical Curiosities. And remember: a counterfeit dollar, hung in a museum as found art by Andy Warhol, will have a value in the hundreds of thousands, whereas a “real” dollar, blessed by the Wizards in the Federal Reserve, will retain its meager face value until inflation reduces it even further.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Elmyr said it most bluntly: “Without the Experts, there would be no forgers.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“How about the Federal Reserve, then, which has convinced millions that the paper it prints “is” “real” “money”? Prank or fraud? Or perhaps some species of magick that only other sorcerers can understand?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“As Krishnamurti said to Rajneesh, “You want a Rolls Royce? Go to America. Over there, there’s a Seeker born every minute.” Rajneesh found so many seekers that he eventually owned 93 Rolls Royces.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“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 III: My Life After Death

“(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 III: My Life After Death

“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 III: My Life After Death

“Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Nobody knows who they were or what they were doing, but they left a legacy. — This Is Spinal Tap”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“But, after the unmasked or naked vision of Ishtar—the world experienced as infinitely more than all masks — we can never take any one mask (or any one pookah) as seriously as its Idolators. We can see many kinds of truth in many kinds of masks, and we can see the fallacies in all of them — chiefly, the fallacies of allness (the mask includes all) and Identification (the mask “is” all.)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“All “paths of liberation” (brain-freeing schools) know that we cannot remain in the abyss of the nameless forever, unless we choose to become hermits. (Very few do.) Once we have returned from a school of brain-change to the ordinary world, we again must see and think in masks, or we will not have the ability to communicate with and deal with others.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“In the strip-tease, the dancer removes one article of clothing after another and then appears naked. This “tease,” some think, derives from the myth of Ishtar, who descended to Hell and had to remove one article of clothing at each of its seven gates. At the last gate, naked, Ishtar entered Eternity. This symbolizes the removal of one mask after another until no masks remain. That state, as described by all who’ve lived it, transcends all words and categories: we cannot communicate the unmasked by any new mask.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“We have manufactured all “material things” out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, “We are all greater artists than we realize.” (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, “From the beginning, there has never been a ‘thing.’”)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Kind of makes me wonder. George Lucas, as noted earlier, could fake this on film, but I don’t know of any existing technology that would fake it in several parts of a “real,” “solid” town.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social “game” — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Three different answers . . . and in the Exegesis he went on wondering and seeking new answers until his final stroke killed him. I loved Phil Dick for his books, and I loved him as a man of genius when we met; through the Exegesis I have come to know him as a philosopher so honest that even Nietzsche would have to admit he did not hesitate to challenge all his own ideas. What pleasure I find in writing about this open-minded, ever-questioning, intensely alive person, after the hours devoted to creeping around dark dogmatic caves with troglodytes like Sagan, Gross and Levitt . . .”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Nietzsche said that mystics never practiced the kind of ruthless honesty, or skepticism, which he dared. He would have had to withdraw that condemnation in the case of Phil Dick (and also, I think, in the case of Aleister Crowley.) Phil never did stop questioning, doubting and seeking alternative models (masks) to contain-or-explain his ‘patanormal perceptions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of “is” and “all” and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, “A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“Looking again at “internal sentences,” consider how many so-called mental and emotional illnesses take the form of habitual self-hypnosis with “allness” sentences like “I always screw up,” “They’re all rejecting me,” “They all know I goofed again,” “They all hate me,” “I never win” etc. etc. Allness certainly does have a remarkable correlation with mental/emotional illnesses, and probably with physical illnesses, too, because your body “hears" everything you think.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“As Korzybski said once (violating his own ideal of E-Prime) “Allness is an illness.” In fact, the F-scale, invented by Adorno and used to measure fascist tendencies, does show a correlation between heavy use of “allness” statements and the fascist personality. Can you imagine a full page by any fascist (or any red fascist) without reckless generalizations about all members of some scapegoat group?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“In anthropology the debate about whether humanity consists of three races or five wasted incredible time and energy earlier in this century, and the Eugenicists continue to waste energy on the question of the superiority or inferiority of one race over or under all others. In E-Prime, we can only ask, “What heuristic advantages do we obtain from a three-race model? A five-race model? What heuristic advantages might we find in Buckminster Fuller’s one-human-race model? What kind of evidence indicates statistical superiority, and in what areas? What kind of evidence indicates that those inferior in one area score as superior in other areas? Do we have any tests yet that approach these questions without any cultural bias?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“In economics, “The Marxist model seems better to me than the Monetarist model” states a fact (about the nervous system of the speaker, if I must make the obvious even more obvious.) “Marx is true and the Monetarists are refuted” states an opinion disguised as a fact. The former encourages intelligent discussion; the latter virtually incites emotional conflict.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“In physics, recall the time and energy once wasted by brilliant theoreticians debating “Is the electron a wave or a particle?” In E-Prime this becomes “Does the wave model of the electron model tell us more than, as much as, or less than the particle model?” Once stated that way, it would not have required the genius of Bohr to find the answer, which appears nowadays as “Usually, as much as; sometimes, in special cases, more or less than.” (Insofar as Bohr admitted the influence of the pragmatist James and the existentialist Kierkegaard, both of them also obvious influences on E-Prime, Bohr had the spirit, if not the letter, or E-Prime, when he realized physics could usefully model the electron both as wave and as particle in different contexts: a triumph of perspectivism that, curiously, does not arouse the fury of Gross and Levitt . . .)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“In psychology, for instance, consider how much time learned people have wasted debating such questions as “Does the patient do this because he is in Oedipal rebellion or because he is still following early conditioning?” In E-Prime, this question becomes “Does the Freudian model help us to understand this patient’s behavior more than, as much as, or less than the Pavlovian model?” One can still have lively debate, but the debate will remain scientific and not drift off, unaware, into medieval theology or demonology.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

“All “is” statements expressing judgment become more accurate (describe the instrument used to make the evaluation) when rephrased as “seems to me” statements: “Beethoven seems better to me than Punk Rock,” “Punk Rock seems better to me than Beethoven,” “Abstract Expressionism seems like junk to me,” “Abstract Expressionism seems to me the most important innovation since Cubism” all speak a “truth” — in the sense of the truth of experience or the truth of perception — even though different people will speak them. (Ah, alas, Gross and Levitt detect sinister “perspectivism” rearing its head again . . .)”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death