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I donât believe anything, but I have many suspicions. I strongly suspect that a world âexternal to,â or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense. I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignty, like the internet; and that it does not function hierarchically.
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Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices.
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The strongest form of this non-local model, called super-determinism, claims that everything âisâ one thing, or at least one process. From the Big Bang to the last word of this sentence and beyond, nothing can become other than it âis,â since everything remains part of a correlated whole.
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All particles remain correlated because they never move in space or time, because space and time only exist âin our heads.â
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It may seem startling to contemplate probability matrices in which everything âisâ the cause of everything in one sense and nothing âisâ the cause of anything in another sense, but such is the probable world in which we probably live according to current science.
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nothing matters but the quality
of the affection â
in the end â that has carved the trace in the mind
ï»żdove sta memora
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A basic sociological and anthropological law holds that while every culture (and every sub-culture) has different Game Rules regarding speech and behavior, each tends to believe that its own tribal rules represent the only âcorrectâ way for humans to interact with each other. Among savages, you must learn the local taboo system quickly or your life may pay for your ignorance.
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MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in Conformity with Will. . . .Â
Illustration: it is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take âmagical weapons,â â pen, ink and paper; I write âincantationsâ â these sentences â in the âmagical language,â i.e., that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth âspirits,â such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people . . .
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If I use certain words that cause you to have certain predictable neuro-somatic reactions, I have cast a spell upon you. I have enchanted you. I may even have cursed you.
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We may never achieve Total Clarity (short of infinity), but we should at least have the ability to distinguish between what humans can experience and what they can only blather about.
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âPerceptionâ consists of a complex series of codings and decodings as in-form-ation trans-forms itself through successive sub-systems of the organism-as-a-whole.
We never experience âthoughts,â âfeelings,â âperceptions,â âintuitions,â âsensations,â etc. We invent those categories after the fact. What we experience, nanosecond by nanosecond, consists of continuous synergetic reactions of the organism-as-a-whole to the environment-as-a-whole.
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I saw a man upon the stair,
A little man who wasnât there;
He wasnât there again today,
ï»żGee, I wish heâd go away!
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The first rule of politics is to use the language precisely. Otherwise, nobody understands anybody else, and everything falls into chaos.
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When generalizing without statistics we should use the term âsombunallâ â some but not all â in every single case where we have not in fact examined all members of a set or class. Where you feel more sure of yourself than I usually do, you may use âmosbunallâ â most but not all.
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If we understood our dreams better we would use our technology more wisely. Our machines manifest our dreams in matter crafted to coherence, and a psychoanalysis of our culture could easily derive from an examination of how we use science to materialize our fantasies and nightmares.
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In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.
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Remember that the ancient Greeks did not distinguish âArtâ from âScienceâ as we do.
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We must wonder if more than childish fantasy lurks in the concept of Donald Duck walking on air only until he âremembersâ that this âisâ officially âimpossibleâ in our current reality-tunnel.
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Of course, if one dares to suggest that a dream contains precognition, the Rationalist immediately declares the connection between the dream image and later waking events âisâ âmere coincidence.â Those with a psychological block against recognizing electricity would probably say, similarly, that when you flick the switch and the light goes on that âisâ also âmere coincidence.â
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Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitation is based on experience of the past, and every step in his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or to what he may do.
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We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! It is our own!
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Iâve recently noticed âas if for the first timeâ that when people pray they always look âupwardâ â i.e., perpendicular to whatever place theyâre standing â or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their âgodâ as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth.
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134 reads
In general, no world-class artist became a âclassicâ by doing what somebody else had already done.
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Learning âhow to become what you areâ takes a lifetime, but it still seems the best game in town.
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I live amid wonders. which I file under the law of general semantics which states that no map can ever show âallâ the territory. In fact, I think we should ban the word âallâ from ordinary speech and restrict it solely to pure mathematics.
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Solche Werke [groĂer Geister] sind Spiegel; wenn ein Affe hinein guckt, kann kein Apostel heraussehen.
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Two-valued Euclidean choices â left or right of an imaginary line â do not seem very ârealâ to me, in comparison to the versatility of modern science and mathematics.
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I am committed to the maximization of the freedom of the individual and the minimization of coercion.
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Just as theories and ideologies are human creations, every perceptual grid or existential reality-tunnel is also a human creation â a work of art, consciously or unconsciously edited and organized by the individual brain.
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âRealityâ is a multi-ordinal concept, having different meanings on different levels of abstraction. On the lowest level of abstraction ârealityâ refers to immediate sensory consistency; on the highest, ârealityâ refers to logical consistency with a body of established scientific fact and theory. There are many other levels of abstraction and, hence, many kinds of âreality.â I call this the semantic relativity of âreality.â
Every tribe has its own weltanschauung.
Every nervous system creates its own âreality.â
To recognize this is the prerequisite of sophistication, tact, and true tolerance.
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The universe may be not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.
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The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured.
The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics â the human mathematical mindscape. Thus, unless youâre an illiterate and malnourished Asian with exactly 1.04 vaginas and 0.96 testicles, living in substandard housing, you do not qualify as normal but as abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, paranormal or some variety of nonnormal.
We never know âallâ â we only know what I dub sombunall â some-but-not-all.
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The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.
Authority, by dividing people into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing us all on an equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between people are based on authority and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn together.
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A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly in the means of production." Since humans extend their nervous systems through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, TV, Internet, etc., whoever controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individualâs brain.
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We should all try to give out as much good energy to other human beings as we possibly can.
Every bit of bad energy we put out has adverse effects that go on forever. Every bit of anger, resentment, hate, and so on that you send out passes from the target to somebody else convenient to the target, who then gets targeted, and so on, without stopping. The same is true of good energy: every bit of good energy one puts out makes someone else feel a little bit better. If people were really conscious of this psychological fact, they would put out nothing but good energy, no matter what.
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The past does not always unfold chronologically. Itâs the same with ideas â some are held for a long time, some are held for just one afternoon. There is no consistent ego.
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Psychologist John Barefoot has studied this extensively and concludes that optimists live about 20% longer than pessimists. When the outcome remains unknown, why should I make the bet that keeps me miserable and shortens my life? I prefer the gamble that keeps me high, happy, and creative, and also increases life span. Itâs like the advantage of pot over aspirin. Pot not only kills pain better, but the High boosts the immune system. High and happy moods prolong life, miserable and masochistic moods shorten it.
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RAW's writings have a wonderful way of opening your mind to all kinds of quirky ideas. Here are some that I had when reading this book:
Feel free to share your own in the comments ^^
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Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy â and donât take crap from anybody!
KEEP THE LASAGNA FLYING.
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IDEAS CURATED BY
CURATOR'S NOTE
Quotes that may change the way you perceive the world.
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