Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits by Robert Anton Wilson, the 1987 first Falcon Press paperback edition, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
This is the edition from the old Falcon Press. The book is now available from New Falcon Press as Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond.
“We all find it hard to believe that reality is as much our own creation as Professor Rogers’ research and poet Sandburg’s parable suggest. Conservatives, who pride themselves on having a ‘hard-nosed’ and ‘realistic’ attitude to the ‘brute facts’ of life, are suspicious of anything that introduces subjective elements or implies that the ‘brute facts’ may exist only in their own heads. Liberals, dogmatically committed to what they believe is scientific skepticism (mostly, in fact, popularizations of obsolete pre-Einstein physics), are wary of any idea that seems to open a door to ‘mysticism’ or (God forbid) traditional otherworldly religion. And radicals, of course, react like a bull toward a colored cloth when confronted with notions that imply (in Shakespeare’s words) that ‘nothing is but thinking makes it so,’ since that could easily lead to telling the poor that the proper mental attitude, and not more government spending, is the cure for their miseries.”
“As I said, this book cannot hope to end this perennial quarrel between the conservative Establishment and the adventurous young. All I reasonably can try to accomplish here, in treating mostly the sexual aspect of the drug revolution, is to shed light on these ‘benign, thoroughly charming, even glorious’ aspects of the alternate programs and alternate perceptions that certain drugs create. This should at least give the ordinary reader some insight into the motives of those who subscribe to the drug revolution, which is hardly the insane scramble for self-destruction portrayed by its most hostile critics.” — Introduction
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