You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out

The words of Robert Anton Wilson — “You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can’t stop me... It’s called senility.” — emerge from the depths of wit and wisdom, a jest shimmering with both humor and melancholy. At first, it is laughter that greets these words, for Wilson, the philosopher of paradox, was ever fond of turning seriousness upon its head. Yet, as the laughter fades, the mind begins to stir. Beneath the veil of comedy lies a meditation on the nature of aging, freedom, and the unyielding rebellion of the human spirit.

The origin of this quote lies in Wilson’s lifelong battle against conformity and control. A visionary writer, satirist, and thinker, he lived during an age when governments sought to regulate not only the actions of men but their very thoughts — through censorship, dogma, and the war on consciousness. Wilson, who once explored the boundaries of the mind through science, mysticism, and psychedelics, saw the mind as the last frontier of freedom. With characteristic irony, he jested that when age dulls memory and thought begins to drift — when one becomes “senile” — the mind once again escapes control. In this jest lies his triumph: that even decay could be reclaimed as a form of freedom, that the mind’s autonomy remains untouchable even when reason falters.

In this way, the quote becomes more than a joke — it becomes a parable. Wilson invites us to see that freedom of consciousness is sacred and ungovernable. Governments may tax, monitor, and punish, but they cannot imprison the boundless play of imagination. To be “high” in this sense is not merely intoxication; it is transcendence — the ability to slip the leash of ordinary reality, to think beyond what is permitted, to laugh in the face of authority. Thus, when Wilson speaks of senility, he mocks both the fear of aging and the arrogance of power. The failing mind, in its confusion, may stumble upon a strange kind of liberty — one that no law, no bureaucracy, no tyranny can reach.

There is wisdom here, as the ancients might say, wrapped in folly. For even senility, the loss of control, becomes a mirror of life’s great truth: that all control is illusion. Man clings to youth, to order, to mastery over his own mind and world. But time, that great dissolver, humbles all. And in that humility, Wilson finds a strange serenity — the acceptance that the self is not a fortress, but a wave passing through eternity. Like the philosopher Diogenes, who lived in poverty yet mocked kings, Wilson uses absurdity to unmask truth. The joke is not merely on senility, but on the hubris of all systems — those that believe they can regulate the infinite dance of human thought.

Consider the story of Socrates, condemned by Athens for “corrupting the youth.” His crime was teaching men to think for themselves. Even as he drank the hemlock, his mind was freer than that of his judges. They could end his life, but they could not chain his consciousness. Wilson’s humor springs from this same defiance. Whether through reason, laughter, or the fog of age, the thinking soul eludes control. When the government cannot ban senility, it cannot ban freedom. The mind, even in madness or decline, remains a domain unto itself — an untamed wilderness beyond decree.

The lesson is both joyful and sobering: Freedom is not the absence of control, but the power to transcend it. Life will age the body, cloud the mind, and surround us with institutions that claim to protect us but often seek to define us. Yet even then, we can laugh, we can imagine, we can rebel in spirit. Wilson teaches that humor is the philosopher’s sword — sharper than any law, swifter than any punishment. To laugh at fear is to master it; to mock death is to live beyond it.

Therefore, let the hearer of these words take heed. Do not mourn the loss of youth or the gathering of years. Instead, cherish the flame of consciousness that no hand can extinguish. Cultivate the kind of mind that even in its wandering reveals truth. And above all, keep your laughter — for laughter is the music of freedom, the sound that tyrants cannot silence.

So when age comes, and the world grows dim, remember Robert Anton Wilson’s jest. In the fog of forgetfulness, there is still liberty. In the decline of mind, there is still the refusal to be ruled. The spirit of freedom, once awakened, cannot be bound by any power — not by law, not by age, not even by time itself. And if the cost of that liberation is a little madness, then let us, as Wilson would say, embrace it with a smile — and be joyfully, defiantly, “spaced out for hours on end.”