Robert Anton Wilson: Consciousness, Conspiracy & Coincidence -- Thinking Allowed w/ Jeffrey Mishlove

[Music] uh in around 1973 I became convinced for a while that I was receiving messages from outer space but then a psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher and another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish Bard and at that time I started read in neurology and I decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain and then I went to Ireland and I found out it was actually a 6 foot tall white rabbit they call it the puka and the Irish know all about

it so it depends on who I'm talking to which of these metaphors I use to explain where these uh weird uh patterns come from that jump out of the books and take hold of the readers and change their lives it's not me it's a 6' tall white rabbit from County kry or it's the left that's the right hemisphere of everybody's brain MH we're only different in the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere we all share in the same morphogenetic field the collective unconscious and the collective unconscious now you've been accused by some people one might

think of them as fundamentalists materialists as as being something of a fanatic actually and yet it seems that you're almost the opposite reality is extremely slippery for you you I don't get the feeling that you're stuck on any one model of reality well you know what Freud wrote about projection uh the people yeah I have been accused of being a Fanatic in uh the skeptical Inquirer but you just have to open that journal to see the people who put it out are all Fanatics and the people who accuse me of being possessed by devils are

all the type of right-wing fundamentalist who rolls around and speaks in tongues and gives all the signs of being possessed by the devil themselves so I I tend to look at uh I I think I I basically I'm a mirror my books are mirrors and when a monkey looks in no philosopher looks out well how do you separate the inside from the outside well that is one of the difficulties that's why people get embroiled in weirdies while they're reading my books because I'm dissolving the difference between the inside and the outside like most people think

their head is in inside the universe but I have demonstrated in several of my books that uh the universes inside our heads our head is outside the universe uh like um this whole studio for instance it's it's got to be inside my head or I wouldn't be aware of it I've got a model of it inside my head now inside that model of the studio is a model of me and on top of the model of me is a model of my head but that's not my real head my real head contains the studio and

my body and this model of a head and the same with the whole universe the the whole universe is a model contained in my head which contains a model of my head so I've got two heads the head outside the universe and the head inside the universe now I that should be perfectly clear but if it isn't Bren Russell has a proof using six-dimensional geometry in his book the nature of human knowledge I hope that clarifies which is inside and which is outside we don't have to get trapped than that again well what one of

the points that you often make is is that we get caught up in these apparent paradoxes because of linguistic habits and and a habit that we've had since the time of Aristotle of thinking in terms of syllogistic logic well yeah I I believe our language we can we can only uh see what we observe and we can only observe what we have categories for in our language that's known as the war hypothesis in anthropology actually it goes back to gam Batista Vico an 18th century Neapolitan who has been a major influence on me as well

as on James Joyce and um my books are full of neologisms and odd uses of language just to break through the habits of perception that are conditioned by using ordinary English MH you once wrote a whole book without using the verb is yes that's Quantum psychology I also break sentences up and the Burrows way so there's no subject and predicate I use joyy and stream of Consciousness I I run words together so one word has five different meanings depending on which way you look at the sentence I like Joy dead infans wake all of this

is um attempts to get us out of the lines of word and image that were laid down by our ancestors after all if we're seeing the World our ancestors put into our language we're not seeing the world we're living in it's obvious that our ancestors did not live with computers spaceships uh George Bush and other incredible uh occurrences uh that are typical of Our Lives [Music]