Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Perception is reality.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

Reality is mind-made.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.

You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

Now is all we have. Everything that has ever happened to you, and anything that is ever going to happen to you, is just a thought.

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.

We are what we think.

We live in condensations of our imagination

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

Humans see what they want to see.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.