"Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied <...> "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality <...>"
<...>"That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society."
"Not the ideology. The Reality." <...> "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic."
"Just like Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords."
"And like Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hunded thousand harmless junkied became criminals overnight, by the Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by the Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second."
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Truth is the opposite of lies. The opposite of most of what you've heard all your life.
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I was a lawyer once, when I first came to your country and before I went in for piracy. I usually don't admit that <...>. I usually tell people I played piano in a whorehouse or something else not quite so disreputable as the truth.
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People today were still wrapped in a celophane of false ego, and even if they fucked and had orgasms together the cellophane was still there and no real contact had been made.
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It is the eye of the God, the One, the scientific-technical eye of ordered knowledge that looks down on the universe and by perceiving it causes it to be. If an event is not witnessed, it does not happen; therefore, for the universe to happen there must be a Witness.
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One idea had remained fairly constant, however <...> That idea was that more government, tougher government, more honest government was the answer to all human problems.
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And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kinds of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose a lifetime of your typical god was hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes us to watch a movie.
So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth <...>...
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Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, end every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' 'Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can brake the bottle any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry.
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The most important lesson of all, the one that explains all the horrors and miseries of the world, is that you can get of the Wheel at any point and declare the trip is over. That's okay for any given man or woman, if their ambitions are modest. The trouble starts when, out of fear of further movement - out of fear of growth, out of fear of change, out of fear of Death, out of any kind of fear - such person tries to stop the Wheel literrally, by stopping everybody else. That's when the two great bum trips begin: Religion and Government. The only religion consistent with the whole Wheel is private and personal; the only government consistent it is self-government. Whoever tries to lay his trip on others is acting from terror, and will soon resort to terror as a weapon if the others won't accept the trip through persuasion. Nobody who understands the whole Wheel will do that, however, for such people understand that every man and every woman and every child is the Self-Begotten One <...>
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The ordinary person senses as he or she has been tought to sense - that is, as they have been programed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation - which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis <...> - he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist (Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously <...>. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it.)
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It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does only because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.
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THOMAS JEFFERSON. A revolutionary hemp-grower who once wrote, "[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough too in their opinion." Few of the pious tourists who read the italicized portion of this statement carved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., are aware of its context.
- Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
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