Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.

Amputechture' is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved.

I was a new devotee of Eastern mysticism and even though I did not join that particular group, I could well have done. They seemed a bit extreme but I regarded myself as not quite ready.

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

Some say that sudden knowledge of mystical matters is accomplished only in complete quietude, or that Creator, in one of God's many forms, appears only in orderly ways that are beauteous and picturesque, or that the mystical appears only in completely silent ways. All are true. Except for the 'only' part.

Indeed, in the present climate of mistrust of institutions, many people who yearn for a more meaningful and fulfilling life would regard the church as an unlikely place to go for guidance.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

Pass the pub that wrecks your body And the church, all they want is your money

Mysticism is in fact the only criticism people cannot level against my theory.

Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

The business and method of mysticism is love.

Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.

Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

Ask me, it's a sin to pervert faith with religion. Despite every church, mosque, & synagogue in it, this is not the world any God worth his salt would have created.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,/ Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds/ Believe you prosper even as you fall,/ Can you not see that we are worms, each one/ Born to become the angelic butterfly/ That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?

All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

We view Sufism not as an ideology that molds people to the right way of belief or action, but as an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies ... Sufi study and development gives one capacities one did not have before.

Mysticism is: a. An advanced state of inner enlightenment. b. Union with Reality. c. A state of genuinely satisfying success. d. Insight into an entirely new world of living. e. An intuitive grasp of Truth, above and beyond intellectual reasoning. f. A personal experience, in which we are happy and healthy human beings.