Quotes About Experience

Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of contradictions. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberating than is the descent into horror.

Crass," Dr Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that's what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.

God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.

some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.' But when the old offense have ceased to be felt as offences, what then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon. 'One way of knowing God,' he concluded slowly, 'is to deny Him.

Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

Lo que ustedes necesitan es algo con lágrimas, para variar. Aquí nada cuesta lo bastante.

There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.

ÇoÄŸumuzun sadece meskalin etkisi alt?nda gördüÄŸünü her zaman görme yetisi sanatç?ya doÄŸuÅŸtan verilmiÅŸtir. Onun alg?s? biyolojik ve toplumsal olarak yararl? olanla s?n?rl? deÄŸildir. Büyük bilince ait bilginin biraz? beyin ve egonun indirgeme filtresinden s?zar ve sanatç?n?n bilincine akar.

American Notes

Experientia docet ? Experientia doesn't.

Books, he said—books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

And what, we may ask, are these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom.

Ali na svu sre?u ljudi ne ostavljaju dubljeg traga u meni. Samo kratkotrajan dojam, kao što brod u vodi ostavlja brazdu. Ali voda se opet sastavi.

When the phenomenal ego transcends itself, the essential Self is free to realize, in terms of a finite consciousness, the fact of its own eternity, together with the correlative fact that every particular in the world of experience partakes of the timeless and the infinite. This is liberation, this is enlightenment, this is the beatific vision, in which all things are perceived as they are "in themselves" and not in relation to a craving and abhorring ego.

A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal sub-subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. Their critical faculties are undeveloped. The youngest of them have not yet reached the age of reason and the older ones lack the experience on which their new-found rationality can effectively work.

The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.

Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics.

Shrovetides, May Days, Carnivals - these permitted a direct experience of the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity.

Experience teaches only the teachable

If you give experience a chance, if you're prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming.

W]ords are not the same as things and [...] a knowledge of words about facts is in no sense equivalent to a direct and immediate apprehension of the facts themselves.