Success Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson is doing his favorite trick: making metaphysics feel like a pratfall and a revelation at the same time. The opening move - "beautiful and meaningless dance" - refuses the reader the comforting bargain that beauty must come with purpose. It sounds nihilistic until you notice the word "dance": not void, not rubble, but motion, rhythm, participation. Meaninglessness isn’t despair here; it’s a jailbreak from the expectation that existence owes us a thesis statement.

Then he pivots into cybernetic language: "a process with a moving goal". That phrase smuggles in systems theory and evolutionary thinking - the idea that life isn’t marching toward a fixed endpoint but constantly redefining what "success" even is. In Wilson’s hands, teleology becomes slippery: the target moves because the shooter is part of the target range. It’s an anti-dogmatic stance dressed up as description.

The final line lands the punch: "a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now". The paradox is the point. How can something be both process and finished? Wilson collapses the cosmic into the immediate, a psychedelic mindfulness that doesn’t need incense. He’s undercutting grand narratives by insisting the only "complete" perspective is the one you can actually inhabit: the present, embodied vantage point.

Context matters: Wilson’s work (especially his countercultural, Discordian-inflected writing) treats reality as a consensus hallucination with optional settings. This quote isn’t a doctrine; it’s a permission slip to hold contradictory frames at once - and to notice how alive that feels.