Where to begin?...... ok..... ROBERT ANTON WILSON.. R.A.W. . OLD BOB..
I really don't know how to begin a Blog on such a subject. It's like trying to explain the origins of life. So let it be known that whatever is left here will be completely inadequate, I highly encourage those of you that are not familiar with R.A.W. to research for yourself. To begin, my first experience with R.A.W's work/ideas was from a lecture he gave in 1984 called "The Acceleration of Knowledge." The Audio Book came in to work several years ago, and I've listened to it multiple times a year ever since. It's only but an Hour and a Half, but he summarizes the history and spread of knowledge throughout nearly every age of man, and how civilization has moved from the East to the West and leaping from one cultural hub to the next. With each East to West Jump comes an increase in knowledge and speed at which knowledge is spread. His sense of humor was the likes of Lenny Bruce, he called this East to West leap the Jumping Jesus Phenomena.
One of the most troubling things for those that don't have a primer in R.A.W. is that he doesn't tell you what to think, he simply tries to help you think for yourself by showing complex possibilities to proposed questions, often purposefully including obvious logically flawed ideas to aid the listener or reader in coming to grips with the idea that what they are looking at may or may not contain the truth. This is frustrating to most folks that live in a Fox News, CNN, sound bite world and want the clean simple truth. Destroying that very idea, that there is a clean simple truth, was his life's work.
"The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective. "
"Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become. Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan."
In order to even approximate doing justice to the man, this post will regularly be updated....
Please check back from time to time. Until next time....................................................................don't forget to (SMI²LE)
Read more at Boing Boing, Wikipedia, You Tube or use your own brain and find the myriads of information available somewhere else.
Robert Anton Wilson was the founder of the Guns and Dope Party:
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment