Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

A good first (fiction) Robert Anton Wilson book to read. Funny yet mind-bending. ISBN:0440500702

Whole book online?

an excerpt I'd quoted before...

• including... Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing. Some of the primates got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught. Those who got caught were called no-good shits. This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories. (Blame)

Getting Even was the basis of many Primate semantic (General Semantics) confusions, such as "expropriating the expropriators", "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty", "they did it to me so I can do it to them", and in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero". The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two, and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. They did not understand causality at all. The few primates who did understand causality slightly called it Karma. They said all sorts of foolish things about it. They didn't even know enough mathematics to describe quantum probability waves. They said, in crude hominid metaphor, and bad karma let to "bad vibes". (zero-sum game)

The tribal stage endured 100,000 years, as it had before. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technoloogy advanced. Nuclear energy was rediscovered, and misused again. The tribal age endured 12,000,000 years the next time. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right... The six-legged Terran majority knew little and cared less about all this Primate actiivty. They had solved all their social problems three billion years earlier, and saw no need to change. They followed their own DNA cycles, just as monotonously as the primates followed primate cycles.

Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with "I am a sinner, also" (Mind the Hole), which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended all his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence.... Pope Stephen's whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas: Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. Which may be rendered: Three things are required for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance.