Quotes from book
Prometheus Rising
Prometheus Rising is a book by Robert Anton Wilson first published in 1983. It is a guide book of "how to get from here to there", an amalgam of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, Sociobiology, Yoga, relativity, and quantum mechanics, amongst other approaches to understanding the world around us, and claiming to be a short book about how the human mind works and how to get the most use from one. Wilson describes it as an "owner's manual for the human brain".
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 4 : The Anal Emotional Territiorial Circuit, p. 68
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 14 : The Meta Programming Circuit, p. 224
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 5 : Dickens & Joyce : The Two-Circuit Dialectic, p. 90
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 14 : The Meta-Programming Circuit, p. 219
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 1 : The Thinker & The Prover, p. 25
Context: Comparative religion and philosophy show that the Thinker can regard itself as mortal, as immortal, as both mortal and immortal (the reincarnation model) or even as non-existent (Buddhism). It can think itself into living in a Christian universe, a Marxist universe, a scientific-relativistic universe, or a Nazi universe—among many possibilities.
As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.
The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.
To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere.
“Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.”
Variant: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.
Source: Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 1 : The Thinker & The Prover, p. 28
Context: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
