Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson’s line plays like a Zen koan rewritten by a conspiracy buff with a philosophy habit: if consciousness is an “infinite regress,” then the mind is a hall of mirrors that never lands on a final, authoritative “self” to certify what’s real. The joke is that he offers this bottomless uncertainty as an “explanation” for coincidences - the one kind of experience people most want to pin down, either as destiny or as evidence of hidden machinery.

The intent isn’t to solve coincidence but to destabilize the reader’s appetite for solutions. “Infinite regress” is a technical phrase with a trapdoor: once you start asking who is aware of the awareness, and who is aware of that, you can’t stop without choosing an arbitrary stopping point. Wilson’s subtext is pure anti-dogma. He’s mocking the impulse to treat patterns as proofs, whether the pattern is mystical (“the universe is speaking to me”) or paranoid (“they’re signaling each other”).

Context matters: Wilson built a career on puncturing consensus reality, from countercultural psychedelia to his love of “maybe logic,” the idea that beliefs should be held provisionally. Read that way, coincidences aren’t cosmic messages; they’re what happen when a pattern-making machine stares into a world too large to summarize. The regress isn’t a bug, it’s the human condition: you can always reinterpret the interpretation. His sly punchline is that once you admit that, coincidences stop being revelations and start being mirrors - of attention, expectation, and the stories we’re desperate to live inside.