Quotes About Experience

When a woman is touched by an archetypal experience, she often collapses before it. It is in this collapse that she quickly recovers her archetypal connection and restores her inner being.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)

I do not dare assert that the one is actually a conscious mind in the same way that each of us is a conscious mind. It is found through the unconscious, and unconscious it probably is in essence. I can understand why many, bowled over by this experience, call it God, but I still feel that all ideas of God are only symbols of the experience itself.

I'm sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.

EMIC REALITY: the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions that organizes our inchoate experience into meaningful patterns; the paradigm or model that people create by talking to each other, or by communicating in any symbolism; the culture of a time and place; the semantic environment. Every emic reality has its own structure, which imposes structure upon raw experience.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. Nothing is real and everything is real as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.

In the Real Universe we are re-active mechanisms; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The Real Universe is just another of our creations — a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us.

The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — not mind, not self, not doing, not existence, even not non-existence.

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

If the so-called laws contained in our models are only generalizations based on our experience until this date — if they are not spaceless, timeless, eternal and given by some divinity or other — then things that do not fit our current models should not be rejected a priori. They should be studied carefully, as clues that might lead us to better models tomorrow.

All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it. The model can clarify the muddles, but the model is never the muddle itself. "The map is not the territory"; the menu does not taste like the meal.

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings. One may suspect that this is why the materialist age has become increasingly inhuman, ugly, amoral and blindly irresponsible.

In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.

Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.

Ultimately, what we find in any experience, sexual or otherwise, depends upon our own emotional energy field. We can see a small mountain above a deep valley, or a shallow valley with a tall mountain towering over it.