Reflections of the Machine

“We are solar organisms, make no mistake. Though we were born on this earth, we are creatures of the sun. Earth is a wasteland on which the sun casts its fertile seed.”

– Unattributed

“ The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ… of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff



“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

– Thomas Merton



“What I see with my eyes closed and with my eyes open is the same stuff: brain circuitry.”

– Robert Anton Wilson



“The gift of fire a flicking thumb-
in pincher’s bind combustion succumbs
to heartbeat rhythms and rhythmic drums.-
The Bacchic horde is deaf and dumb.”

– Unattributed



“Why be depressed when you can be happy, dumb when you can be smart, agitated when you can be tranquil?”

– Robert Anton Wilson



“Music molecularizes sound matter and in doing so becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces, such as Duration and Intensity.”

– Deleuze and Guattari



“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

– Baudrillard


“He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him.”

– Deleuze and Guattari

“If you say that everything – chaos, darkness, anathema – can be reduced to mathematical formulae – then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgment, and to behave as he likes.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Art is the science of human destiny. Science is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of nature: art is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of man. At its best, it evokes unifying emotions; it makes the reader see the world momentarily as a unity.”

– Colin Wilson

“Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

– Hermann Hesse

“The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”

– Rainer Rilke

“There is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”

– Carl Jung

“What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is indeed on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at all.”

– Samuel Butler

“The meta-programming circuit simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself. The artist seeing himself in his painting, seeing himself seeing himself in his painting…”

– Robert Anton Wilson



“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy microscope in life.”

– Marcus Aurelius

“Specialization is for insects.”

– Robert A. Heinlein


“As every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase emotional tension is to set a time limit on a difficult or dangerous decision.”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?”

– G.I. Gurdjieff


“Like mathematics or music, anthropology is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing about it.”

– Claude Levi-Strauss


“It’s the greatest mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Desiring production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.”

– Deleuze and Guattari


“You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.”

– Frank Herbert


“Jungians say synchronicities contain ‘messages’ from the deep structure of the collective mind. What is the message?”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”

– Samuel Butler


Bell’s Theorem

– “There are no isolated systems: every particle in the universe is in ‘instantaneous’ (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. This Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a whole system.”


“Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and dreams of time.”

– H.P. Lovecraft


“Such are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the souls is dyed by the thoughts.”

– Marcus Aurelius


“Why is everyone in search of god? God is a force of the universe distilled and concentrated within the mother’s womb. Find yourself, god will follow.”

– Unattributed


“She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare.”

– Henry James

“You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James.”

– Deleuze and Guattari


“And paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.”

– Jean Baudrillard


“In this astounding, marvelous, totally wonderful, even mindboggling Miracle, a piece of bread changes into the body of a Jew who lived 2,000 years ago.”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“I am the devil’s advocate and the devil.”

– Unattributed


“Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden, forbidden for him. It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”

– Hermann Hesse


“We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the person of their fathers.”

– Samuel Butler


“In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

– Hermann Hesse


“It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical, glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.”

– Frank Herbert


“Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the pad (sp??). There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do.”

– Aliester Crowley


“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

– Rainer Rilke


“The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.”

– Marcus Aurelius


“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”

– Rainer Rilke


“But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is toward the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world’s literature, the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.”

– Colin Wilson


“Failures in communication generally derive from sending a message to the wrong address. That is, your husband has an ego problem and you send a message to his mind.”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“Failing poetry, I chased my fancied meal through prose, and found everywhere good little stuff, and only a few men who had tried honestly to be greater than mankind; and only their strainings and wrestlings really fill my stomach.”

– T.E. Lawrence


“Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff


“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.”

– Jean Baudrillard


“The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more gratifying than of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.”

– Colin Wilson


“It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human semantic (rational) circuit…”

– Robert Anton Wilson


“Art has no end in view save the emphasizing and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection.”

– Samuel Butler


“Anti-intellectualism has become a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

– Isaac Asimov


“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

– Rainer Rilke


“I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that ‘the world’ would decline to recognize them.”

– Colin Wilson


Teotihuacan = “the place where men become gods”

– This is an interesting city name


“I don’t complain and I don’t make a virtue of it. I’m not the first man who has found beliefs that he can’t put in his pocket like so much small change. But am I to deny them for all that?”

– Harley Granville-Barker “Secret Life”


“It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.”

– Frank Herbert


“I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.”

– Frank Herbert


“Genius clears the air and frightens men.”

– Kierkegaard


“Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable.”

– Paul Valery


“Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don’t see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.”

– Marianne Williamson


“Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, Its readers or spectators, can be fictions.”

– Jorge Luis Borges


“Only he who can be can do.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff


“In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance for you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on precisely the opposite system.”

– Samuel Butler


“I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people.  I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”

–       Hermann Hesse


“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”

–       Hermann Hesse


“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”

–       Hermann Hesse


“To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.  You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you.  There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers.  No servant or disciple can dress the wound.  You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.”

–       Frank Herbert


“I ask you to belief nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.”

–       G.I. Gurdjieff


“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

–       Rainer Rilke


“We are now realizing that half of life on Earth is parasitic – each free-living organism has at least one parasite.”

–       Unattributed


“Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.”

–       Frank Herbert


“A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

–       Samuel Butler


“We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.”

–       Robert Anton Wilson


“…the state is concentric and the individual is eccentric.”

–       James Joyce


“We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points.  Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us.  The pattern of the structure exists within our biological and sociological properties.”

–       Persinger and Lafreniere


“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

–       William Blake


“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.  Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

–       Jean Baudrillard


“The future exists
First in imagination,
then in will,
then in reality.”

–       Barbara Marx Hubbard


“Everywhere there are three or four paths, and you are at the crossroads.”

–       Jean Baudrillard


“It is useless to point to the existence of immoral or bad habits: it is the form of habit – or, as Bergson used to say, the habit of acquiring habits – which is essentially moral or has the form of good.

–       Deleuze and Guattari


“Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”

–       Frank Herbert


“Trust no one in whom the desire to punish is strong.”

–       Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Men are born like smashed radio sets and before they can function properly they must repair themselves.”

–       William Blake


“A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.”

–       G.I. Gurdjieff


“The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”

–       Deleuze and Guattari


“The imaginary was the alibi of the real, in a world dominated by the reality principle.  Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation.”

–       Jean Baudrillard


“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

–       Marcus Aurelius


“What is man?  A bridge between the ape and the Superman – a bridge over an abyss.”

–       Nietzsche


“If you have found the right words, if you have found the words which express the way you are actually thinking, the body will be affected.”

–       David Bohm


“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”

–       Roland Barthes


“No one can advise or help you – no one.  There is only one thing you should do.  Go into yourself.  Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

–       Rainer Rilke


“A man is a god in ruins.  When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, gently as we wake from dreams.”

–       Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Pure information, in the mathematical sense, does not give rise to energy; it is that which orders energy.  It is the negative of entropy.”

–       Robert Anton Wilson


“The world without is a reflection of the world within.”

–       Charles Haanel


“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly.  One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

–       Nikola Tesla


“The great epochs in our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.”

–       Friedrich Nietzsche


“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

–       Haruki Murakami


“You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.”

–       Frank Herbert


“The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself.”

–       Spencer Brown


“The famous ‘Escape’ or ‘run away from it all’ is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint or sail them.  A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that it is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist.”

–       F. Scott Fitzgerald


“I want to be God, and therefore I try to change myself.  I want to dance, to draw, to play the piano, to write verses, to love everybody.  That is the object of my life.”

–       Vaslav Nijinsky


“The noble soul has reverence for itself.”

–       Friedrich Nietzsche


“What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

–       Brecht


“It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.”

–       Badiou


“We don’t travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we’re foolish, but not that foolish.”

–       Beckett


“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires.  Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

–       Frank Herbert


“Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued.  While there is flesh there is money – or the want of money; but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.”

–       Samuel Butler


“And every moment is a new and shocking Transvaluation of all we have ever been.”

–       T.S. Eliot


“All we want is to be able to do our work in peace, to love our women or men without danger, to bring up our children without the influences of the emotional plague, in brief, we do not want to be disturbed and deceived in this short life of ours by a handful of political thieves.  We no longer want our lives ruined by politics.”

–       Wilhelm Reich


“I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.  I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.  Pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously.  It seems absurd.”

–       Robert Anton Wilson, final public statement


“A process cannot be understood by stopping it.  Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

–       Frank Herbert


“The bird fights its way out of the egg.  The egg is the world.  Who would be born must first destroy a world.  The bird flies to God.  The God’s name is Abraxas.”

–       Hermann Hesse


“Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little.”

–       G.I. Gurdjieff


“That which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable).”

–       Paul Watzlawick


“But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”

–       Hermann Hesse


“Homosexuals may or may not be the chief creators of cultural innovation, as some Gay Pride advocates claim; but it is certainly true that they have done more than their fair share.  The reason?  They are not trapped into parent roles.”

–       Robert Anton Wilson


“The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.”

–       Jean Baudrillard


“Each person, every creature in fact, is genius at something.”

–       Unattributed


“That is what style is, or rather the absence of style – assyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode – desire.”

–       Deleuze and Guattari


“The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined.”

–       Alfred Korzybski, the most important premise of General Semantics


“Remember yourself always and everywhere.”

–       G.I. Gurdjieff


“Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.”

–       Frank Herbert


“One describes a tale best by telling the tale.  You see?  The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story.  It is a balancing act and it is a dream.  The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory.  The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.  The tale is the map that is the territory.”

–       Neil Gaimon


“Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.”

–       Marcus Aurelius


“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be giving to you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without knowing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

–       Rainer Rilke


“The tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.”

–       Alan Watts


“Only help he who is not an idler.”

–       G.I. Gurjieff


“Communication is only possible between equals.”

–       Robert Anton Wilson


“Instead of narrowing your world… you will have at last to take the whole world into your soul.”

–       Chandogya Upanishad, VI, ii, 3