My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
There 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the concept of freedom and the illusion of control by societal fears.
Robert Anton Wilson highlights that true freedom exists within the individual, suggesting that societal control is maintained through fear. He posits that if people could attain a state of enlightenment or deep meditation ('dhyana'), they would no longer be subjected to control by societal fears such as imprisonment or violence, thereby asserting that knowledge and awareness can dismantle oppressive structures.
Themes
FreedomFearControlSocietyDhyana
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about personal empowerment, this quote can remind individuals of their innate freedom.
More from Robert Anton Wilson
All quotes →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.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
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.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
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).
Robert Anton WilsonRead
If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
Similar quotes
Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.
Jodi PicoultRead
Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
Umberto EcoRead
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
Stanley CrouchRead
It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
Richard WrightRead
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. ForsterRead