My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that following a master blindly may lead to a loss of personal freedom and enlightenment.
Robert Anton Wilson's quote highlights the irony that an enlightened master is only beneficial if one desires to relinquish their own agency and independence. It implies that true enlightenment comes from within and that relying on external authorities can lead to intellectual and spiritual enslavement. It warns against the dangers of surrendering one's critical thinking and personal power to another person, emphasizing that autonomy is essential for growth and understanding.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on independence and personal growth at a self-improvement workshop.
More from Robert Anton Wilson
All quotes βThere is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Similar quotes
Look round the habitable world, how few Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue!
paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness
I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.
It is a law of our humanity, that man must know both good and evil; he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think.