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
Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!
Interpretation
Fear can confine us, and we must overcome it to attain true freedom.
This quote by Robert Anton Wilson highlights the self-imposed constraints that fear can create in our lives. It suggests that when we allow fear to control us, we become trapped in a metaphorical cage, limiting our freedom and opportunities. Only by confronting and overcoming our fears can we truly experience the freedom we desire.
In practice
In a motivational speech about breaking through personal barriers.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
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.
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).
Charles de Foucauld, the found of the Little Brothers of Jesus, wrote a single sentence that's ahad a profound impact on my life. He said, "The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything." Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba.
Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.
I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.
Many people have been getting too casual about climbing Everest. I forecast a disaster many times.
When, after the accident, I came out into the world and people looked at me, they were shocked. It upset me. I thought they were impolite not to hide their negative emotions about my look.
I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.
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