Coincidance Quotes

“Discordianism shuns dogma but has one catma, the Syadastan Affirmation, which reads, "All affirmations 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." Discordians call this the Free Mantra—unlike the Transcendental movement, they charge no fees—and insist that if you repeat it 666 times you will achieve Spiritual Enlightenment, in some sense.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Most anecdotal evidence concerns ESP between members of the same family. I find that very significant. It obviously has something to do with physical contact. A hell of a lot of ESP involves mothers and children. They were once part of her body. Thet seems to me to fit right in with Bell’s theorem: the idea that things once connected remain always in contact even though they are separated.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“language controls our thinking.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“And therefore, we have space migration and life extension as very probable trajectories of where we are going. Intelligence increase or I2, the middle part of SMI2LE, is Leary’s peculiar emphasis. He points out that psychology has never been a science; it’s always been groping in the dark. But it is advancing, like the other sciences. He feels that in the next ten, twenty or thirty years psychology will become a true science, in the sense that we can then change anything about ourselves we want to change. We will have the knowledge; we will have the techniques. He thinks we’ve got some of them already. And it will be possible to tune our nervous system to different levels of consciousness and intelligence at will.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Well, SMI2LE is Leary’s slogan for space migration, plus intelligence increase, plus life extension. It’s an interesting formula because, if you want to look at it this way, we all live in a triangle of space, time and consciousness. How much space can we travel through? How much time do we have? And how conscious are we of what’s going on? The whole direction of evolution seems to be to produce beings that have much more space, more time and more consciousness.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“I want the reader to ask every couple of pages, “How much of this is put on?” As for the critics who don’t like me, they generally admit that my books are humorous, although if they don’t like the books, they refer to them as undergraduate humor or juvenile humor. That adds to the mystery, of course. There are two factors working all the time. The books are obviously humorous, so that means I can’t be serious. Yet, at the same time, the books are full of real facts and very disturbing connections between the facts, so my God, I must be serious about some of it. So the reader is continually whiplashed back and forth between laughing and thinking “Maybe this is all true after all.” In that way I can introduce the most radical ideas from futuristic science and the most radically philosophical types of doubt and questioning of basic assumptions together with political exposé, and so on, into a collage that I believe genuinely forces the reader to think and to wonder because I really am trying to break down the boundary between art and life.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“But quite frequently I get very pained letters from very sincere people asking, “What the hell do you mean?” They can’t realize that I’m trying to get beyond yes and no and show alternatives, what de Bono calls po thinking. Yes is yes, no is no, and po is let’s consider it. And that’s what I’m always doing. Quite often people write naive letters of great emotional pain, saying “Are we supposed to believe it or not?” And the answer is, from my point of view, you’re not supposed to believe anything: you’re supposed to think about it. Of course, there is a big influence on me, not just from General Semantics and Korzybski, but also from modern physics which has always been a hobby of mind. Since the 1920s quantum physics has given up talking about “truth.” You hardly ever hear physicists utter the word “truth.” They don’t even use the word theory anymore; they prefer the word model. And the General approach is: which model is most useful right now? Your assumption is that there will be a better model in a couple of years. They are doing what de Bono calls lateral thinking and Korzybski calls non-Aristotelian thinking and I call Guerrilla Ontology.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Hitler was a trauma intellectually because of his batty theory of the Elders of Zion plotting to take over Europe; the horrible results of his paranoia created a prejudice about thinking about conspiracies at all. To talk of conspiracy is called the Devil Theory of History and historians make fun of it.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“The priest and the Marquis spent many pleasant afternoons in the courtyard discussing whether the universe was a mindless machine or the creation of a loving God. The priest argued in terms of philosophy and metaphysics, but the Marquis was temperamentally an empiricist and argued always in terms of what the world was actually like. "Look at the smallpox," he would say. "Kills a few hundred thousand every month all over Europe. What kind of Benevolent Intelligence decided to give us that as a birthday present? Did He have constipation that day, to put him in a foul enough mood to perpetuate such a fiendish joke at our expense?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“The DNA is made up of two opposite spirals, positive and negative, which can easily be considered isomorphic to I Ching's yin () and yang (), or Leibniz's 0 and 1, or Joyce's and . These are bonded by four amino acids—adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, which are usually abbreviated A, G, C, T. If one dares to consider these isomorphic with active yang (), passive yang (), active yin () and passive yin (), or Leibniz's 01,11,10 and 00, or Joyce's and , then the parallel becomes staggering. In forming RNA messages—the genetic code—the T (thymine) drops out to be replaced by U (uracil) but we still have four elements—A, G, C, U—and if we permutate them by the now-familiar rule, making all possible combinations of three out of these basic four "letters," we get again 43 or 64 "words," which are the 64 elements of the genetic language.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“The isomorphism of the two systems is the more remarkable because there is nothing in Joyce's letters to indicate that he ever read, or even heard of, the I Ching; but this only repeats the isomorphism, or synchronicity, in which Leibniz also recreated I Ching in the form of his binary notation. As is well known to mathematicians, Leibniz lived long enough to see the first European translation of I Ching and to note the "coincidence" and be astounded by it. It was this isomorphism, in fact, which led Leibniz to postulate a kind of universal logical language below all forms of consciousness, a concept like and yet unlike Jung's "collective unconscious.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: From master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave "intelligently.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the "poor hungry wretches" that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“From "Strange now to think" through "the rhythm the rhythm" the poem has gradually created, just through the integrity of its own emotion, the justification from the drum-beat and thunder of "only to have, only to have" and "with her eyes, with her eyes." If anybody else repeated the "formula," it would only be a trick, because the emotion is in the words and the discovery of the words is the discovery of the emotions. It is Ginsberg's personal Golgotha that we meet here, and if you or I were to tell our own stories we would have to find our own words and emotions. That is why a great work of poetry is always so original as to seem "formless" at first glance. It appears to have no form because it is a new form, manufactured in heart's agony, a shape cut in the air as a sculptor cuts.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“To quote Gurdjieff again, "Life is real then only when I am." If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more "real," perhaps?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“According to Korzybski (Science and Sanity) there is one field, and one field only, in which it is legitimate to ascribe predicates to groups—namely, in pure mathematics. This is legitimate because the groups or sets of pure math are purely abstract and created by definition. All k are x, in a mathematical context, because k and x are defined that way, and because they do not exist outside of pure thought.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“The exact number of people killed in the various witch-hunts, crusades, inquisitions, religious wars, etc., is not recorded anywhere, but the total must run into the tens of millions; Homer Smith, an atheist, arrives at a figure of 60,000,000 in his Man and His Gods, but he is exaggerating (I hope). One Roman pagan skeptically remarked in the 4th Century A.D., that "there is no wild beast more blood-thirsty than an angry theologian." He had only seen the beginning of the feuds between various sects of Christians; the fury rolled on for another 13 centuries before it began to abate. Of course, Homer Smith's estimate of 60,000,000 victims is obtained by including all the Moslems killed in the several Crusades, and the non-Whites in Africa that the Americans and Oceana wiped out in the process of Christianizing the world. For Europe itself the very careful G. Rattray Taylor arrives at conclusions that make Hitler seem like a piker compared to the churchmen:”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Whether Homer was a feminist, a male chauvinist or a woman himself (herself?), he (she?) has all the qualities found in recent male poets, who are notoriously antigovernment, antiwar, antiauthority and fond of women, children, nature and sexuality. Obviously, he was in Freudian terms an oral personality. In any case, his values (and those of later poets like Euripides, Sophocles, the anonymous authors of the Greek Anthology, etc.) were always compatible with sexual love, however much the relationship between men and women had been rendered problematical by the patriarchal system, which had reduced women to second-class citizens.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“I've got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind
I'm a bad motherfucker and I don't mind dyin”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“So there are basically two attitudes towards advanced technology. One, that we shouldn’t have it at all and we should go back to the Dark Ages which is an idea I oppose vehemently. I don’t think people were happy in the Dark Ages. I don’t think returning to a thirty year lifespan and continuous attacks of bubonic plague and smallpox and the other desiderata of those centuries would do us any good at all. So, I like O’Neill’s alternative which is move the technology off planet and put it in colonies. The energy could be beamed down to earth easily.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It’s just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“I like logical positivism as a technique of distinguishing what we know and what we don’t know. But I don’t like it when the logical positivist says that what we don’t know, we shouldn’t talk about anymore. I think there is no sense in stopping thought at any point. The thing is, to know what you’re talking about is what you don’t know, and admit you’re speculating. That’s proper semantic hygiene, not to stop thinking entirely but to admit you are speculating.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“And of course, this is the traditional theme in romantic poetry. I’m very science oriented in many ways. So much so that a lot of people who hate science dislike my books because they dislike the scientific emphasis. But, at the same time I am science oriented, I don’t reject other modes of knowledge. When I find something repeated over and over, my thought is, if enough people have thought this over for many centuries, it’s worth looking at no matter how wild it sounds.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“It fascinates me that Albert Einstein tossed off a remark once which is frequently quoted out of context. He said to Niels Bohr that he did not believe in telepathy. Then he said, “But if it does exist, it probably has more to do with physics than psychology.” The second sentence is often quoted but they don’t quote that he didn’t believe in it. Einstein changed his mind about that later. He was very impressed with Upton Sinclair’s research on ESP. I think Einstein was on the right track and I think the physicists today who are thinking along those lines are on the right track.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say “mass hallucination.” The Catholics say it’s “a miracle by the Blessed Virgin.” I say “it’s some unknown property of the human mind.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“The word “synergy” Fuller got from metallurgy. It’s been used in metallurgy for several centuries and it refers to alloying. When you smelt two metals together, you get a new metal that has properties that neither of the first two had. And Fuller began to notice that there were synergies in every science, not just metallurgy. And so, he coined the word synergy to describe non-linear, non-elementalistic relationships. He is always looking for non-additive relationships where you can put two and two together and get five instead of four. You get more because of the new structure created when you put the parts together. That’s why his domes are up to a thousand time stronger than any other structure containing the same space built by traditional geometry. His domes are all synergetic.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“People are hungry in a lot of places today because of EMIC reality. There is enough food on the planet to feed everybody, but we exist in an EMIC reality in which – because we’re not working together but against one another – collectively we cannot figure out how to feed those people. But the food is here. The food is really here; the potential is here. For 50 years the United States government has been paying farmers not to grow too much food. The only way they can keep the economic system going is by paying farmers not to grow food while people are starving. Now that’s obviously an EMIC reality that’s killing people every day. and it’s come into existence through thought. – through wrong thoughts, in my opinion. If we think correctly, we’ll know how to feed those people.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“So EMIC realities are very powerful. Six million Jews died because of an EMIC realtiy. That reality was as real as the guns and bombs of the war because that reality was believed in.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test

“EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It’s one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Coincidance: A Head Test