Quotes by Robert Burns Wilson

“In short, Dr. Leary and Dr. Reich both landed in jail for psycho-physical clinical work with revolutionary implications for personal and social health. Anybody who repeats their work will also land in jail. Do you think Gross and Levitt really, deep down, believe their claim that science, unlike any other human endeavor, really stands above social prejudice and never, never, never suffers both subtle control (the conservatism of the profession itself) and brutal overt control (imprisonment, book-burning etc.)?””

“This oral bio-survival system makes a feedback loop from mouth to hypothalamus to neuropeptide system to lymph and blood etc., to immunological system. What Transactional Analysis calls the Wooden Leg Game”

“But if science, the paradigm of rationality, is infested with enough stupidity to cause this general one-generation time-lag, what can we say of politics, economics and religion? Time-lags of thousands of years seem to be “normal” in these areas. Indeed, it was through contemplation of religious history that Voltaire was led to his conclusion that human stupidity approximates to the infinite. The study of politics is hardly more inspiring. Let us just summarize the matter by saying that stupidity has murdered and imprisoned more geniuses (and more ordinary people), burned more books, slaughtered more populations, and blocked progress more effectively than any other force in history.””

“History and anthropology reveal that humans have "made do" or at least survived with an incredible variety of metaphor-systems or emic realities. In our own Western civilization, only 600 years ago everybody was living/sensing existence through the Thomist model with a manlike "God" at the top of everything, choirs of "angels" "thrones" and "dominions" descending therefrom, humans wandering about on a flat earth in the middle, and a burning "hell" full of "demons" beneath. Some of the denizens of County Kerry, and evidently some Hollywood screenwriters, are still in that reality-tunnel, which is just as "real" from inside as Beethoven's grandeur is in the existential reality of those inside the classical music coding system.””

“If we are fully hypnotized by a reality-tunnel, we may even become, in conventional terms, a bit mad. In such a state of mania, we might even burn books that contain heresy against our Idols, or fake the data to support our prejudices, or find ourselves compelled to explain increasing amounts of discordant data by accusing vast amorphous conspiracies of having "cooked" the data, or we might even become sincerely convinced that anybody who sees or hears or smells or tastes or otherwise senses anything inconsistent with our Idol must be hallucinating.””

“Medieval Idolatry consisted of metaphors that were called Revealed Truth. Modern Idolatry consists of metaphors that are called Objective Truth. In both cases human linguistic structures”

“I also feel strongly, as a libertarian philosopher, that burning Sheldrake's book is not the best way to seek an answer to such questions; and as a psychologist, I think I detect the familiar odor of primate panic behavior in the suggestion that it should be burned.””

“Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.””