Full length documentary containing multiple clips complied to give us insight into the life and theories of Robert Anton Wilson.
Robert Anton Wilson in interviewed for the DisinfoNation television show. Topics of discussion include conspiracy theory, the Catholic church and the Discordian calendar
Twenty three is the first primary number in which both digits are prime numbers and add up to prime numbers. According to the seventeenth century scholar Archbishop Ussher the world was created on October 23rd, 4004 BC. The end of the world, if we are to believe the Mayans, will be December 23rd, 2012. Julius Caesar was reportedly stabbed twenty three times by his assassins, which is the same amount of letters in the Latin alphabet and also the date in April on which our greatest literary canon, William Shakespeare, was born and died. If I was to tell you that it takes twenty three seconds for the blood to circulate around the body; that the axis of Planet Earth is 23.5 degrees and that computers communicate in 2³ bits (bytes) would you start to become a little suspicious? Maybe not. Some of you more illuminated readers will already have noticed that this article appears on page 23 of this magazine. Is this fate – the work of higher forces – or can it be simply explained away as the result of a particularly astute editorial team?
What is a reality tunnel?
Your reality-tunnel is being constructed during the course of your life by your experiences, thoughts and belief-systems. Your thoughts and belief-systems are basically based on language. Try to think without using internal language! Thinking and all your belief-systems are hence built upon language:
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
(Terence Mc Kenna)
Timothy Leary coined the term reality tunnel and it was then popularised by Robert Anton Wilson. It refers to the concept that with a subconscious set of filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, everyone interprets this same world differently, hence “Truth is in the eye of the beholder”.
Is there objective truth?
This is not necessarily meant to imply that there is no objective truth; just that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs: we can speak of the fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel, the scientific materialist reality tunnel, or the libertarian reality tunnel.
Once the fiction of one ‘reality’ dies as a concept, and the operational fact of ‘realities’ (plural) becomes generally recognized, we might all discover that human beings can actually live together without constantly making war over who has the ‘real reality’.
You create one reality-tunnel at a time out of a phalanx of possible reality-tunnels. You can learn to change your reality-tunnel. You can experience many reality-tunnels.
(Robert Anton Wilson in ‘Cosmic Trigger; Volume 2′)
Link: Reality-tunnel: How beliefs and expectations create what you experience in life
