Quantum Psychology Quotes

“so many people have been hypnotized by Aristotelian ''yes/ no'' logic to the extent that any step beyond that Bronze Age mythos seems to them a whirling, dizzying plunge into a pit of Chaos and the Dark Night of Nihilism.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties.
That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“The numbers of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums — and still train them today — to act with intolerance and premature certainty.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Bohm has avoided speculating about this parallel between his math and ancient Oriental mysticism, but others have not. Dr. Capra in The Tao of Physics uses a Bohmian non-local model of quantum theory as the "true" model (ignoring the physicists who prefer EWG or Copenhagenism) and then points out, quite correctly, that (if we accept this as "the only true quantum model") quantum theory says the same things Taoism has always said.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“In a non-local implicate order, information cannot have a locality, but "permeates" and/or "transcends" all localities. And information that has no locality sounds a great deal like the Hindu divinity Brahma, the Chinese concept of Tao, Aldous Huxley's "Mind At Large," and "the Buddha-Mind" of Mahayana Buddhism. Any one of those concepts must mean information without location (if we admit they mean anything at all).”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“The problem seems to lie in different concepts of what we mean by a Hidden Variable. Dr. Bohm, the man who suggested the design of the Aspect experiments, means something that Einstein and other proto-Hidden Variable theorists had not conceived. From Bohm's point of view, the Aspect experiments weaken the case for local hidden variables, but they tend to support the concept of non-local hidden variables.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“When one begins to appreciate the roles of unconscious suggestibility and self-fulfilling prophecies in human life, this song seems as funny as the latest radioactive fall-out figures.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Of course, the ideal observer of Quantum Mechanics remains a creature hooked up to many subtle instruments. In psychology, the "observer" remains a bag of protoplasm, the resultant of genes, imprints, conditioning and learning. The genes presumably appear at random throughout the population; the imprints occur by accident at points of imprint vulnerability; conditioning and learning depend on family tradition, etc., and these factors, rather than a whimsical (or perverse) "God," probably account for who will and who will not respond to Lourdes, or to Christian Science, or to a shaman's "death-bone," etc.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“When people with guns treat you as possibly guilty, you begin to feel possibly guilty.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Clearly, written in Standard English "The photon is a wave" and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence could not resolve the question, since the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Again: I call this book Quantum Psychology rather than Quantum Philosophy because understanding and internalizing (learning to use) these principles can decrease dogma, intolerance, compulsive behavior, hostility, etc., and also may increase openness, continuous learning, "growth" and empathy — sombunall of which represent goals sought in most forms of psychotherapy, and sombunall forms of mystic religion.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“This variability of humans can function as the greatest evolutionary strength of the human race, since it may allow us to learn from persons imprinted and/or trained to see and hear and smell and think those things we have learned not to see or hear or smell or think. Due to our habit of premature certainty, however, this variability seldom serves that beneficial evolutionary function. More often, when meeting somebody with a different gloss or umwelt, we merely label that person "mad" or "bad" — crazy or evil — or both.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“If we never describe anything "as it is" but only "as it appears to our minds," we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Pure Reason, however, derives from axioms which can neither be proven nor disproven. These axioms appear in consciousness from a level of pre-logical apprehension in which we might as well be gesticulating and pointing — or waving sticks in the air like Zen Masters — instead of talking, because we are trying to indicate or invoke something that exists before words and categories.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a "real" head outside the perceived universe and a "perceived head" inside the perceived universe, and our "real" head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“All kinds of maps or models also show, on examination, the personality or "mental furniture" of their creator, and, to a lesser extent, of the creator's society and linguistic system(s) — the semantic environment.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“In dealing with cryptozoology, lepufology, Disinformation Systems and Quantum Mechanics one eventually feels that one has come close to total nonsense, a basic defect in the human mind (or the Universe?) or some mental fugue similar to schizophrenia or solipsism. However, as our opening drawing showed and we will see again and again, the ordinary perceptions of ordinary people contain just as much "weirdness" and mystery as all these Occult Sciences put together.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Perhaps we have gone a bit further than the strict operationalist would like. We have not only implied that the "physical truth" does not possess more indwelling "deepness" than the "chemical truth," or the "biological truth", or even the "psychiatric truth," and that all these emic realities have uses in their own fields, but we open the possibility that "existential truth" or "phenomenological truth" (the truths of experience) have as much "depth" (and/or "shallowness") as any organized scientific (or philosophic) truths.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“In short, "one deep reality" seems, to this view, as absurd as "one correct instrument," or the medieval "one true religion;" and preferring, say, the wave model of "matter" to the particle model seems as silly as claiming the thermometer tells more of the truth than the barometer.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“Such "axioms of impotence,” as somebody once called them, do not predict the future in the ordinary sense — we know that the future can always surprise us. Limitations of this sort in science merely mean that scientific method cannot, by definition, answer certain questions. If you want answers to those kinds of questions, you must go to a theologian or occultist, and the answers you will get there will not satisfy those who believe in other theologians or occultists, or those who don't believe in such Oracles at all, at all.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“I also employ the "scatter" technique of Sufi writers. Topics do not always appear in linear, "logical" order, but in a non-linear psycho-logical order calculated to produce new ways of thinking and perceiving. This technique also intends to assist the process of "internalization.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“This parallelism between physics and psychology should occasion no great surprise. The human nervous system, after all - the "mind" in pre-scientific language - created modern science, including physics and quantum mathematics. One should expect to find the genius, and the defects, of the human mind in its creations, as one always finds the autobiography of the artist in the artwork.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“If you say, "The word is not the thing," everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred "really is" Sacred and something called Junk "really is" Junk.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World

“would consider it the height of intellectual laziness and mental incompetence to invoke the word "God" to cover the limitations of my imagination and vocabulary. Instead, I will conclude with the wise words of Aleister Crowley. When asked to define the Tao he said, The result of subtracting the universe from itself.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of "mind'' but that it has "mind-like qualities.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

“The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — "not mind," "not self," "not doing," "not existence," even "not non-existence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World