Quotes About Experience

Rewriting in English Prime we find John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office and John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. We have left the realm of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in space-time. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

Evidently, if Lise had expected to meet Jesus and his 12 apostles and copulate with all of them in turn, that is what she would have remembered afterward.

This is precisely the sort of thing that occurs on an LSD trip. The difference is that the noise and newly created information is coming in at the tripper, not just through words on a page, but through each of the senses, including the 17 senses that modern science has discovered in addition to the traditional sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

It begins to seem that no one reality-tunnel is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

I refer the cynical reader back to the 31-year-old scientist quoted earlier who said "I can feel myself actually fusing with the other person – it is difficult to know even anatomically what part of myself is me and what part is the woman." He was not even using ritual programming to get that result; the drug alone led him there, and it was only comparatively weak marijuana, not the stronger hashish.

Under the magnification of LSD, this kind of neurotic racing-the-clock becomes impossible; since every moment is eternity, there is no possibility of rushing anything.

The same magnification effect probably explains why some users have found that, for them, LSD is a sexual turn-off, an anaphrodisiac. Under this lens, such persons confront their own negative attitudes toward sex in expanded and enlarged form, and with no possibility of hurrying past them at a blind gallop. If such remnants of puritanism are strong enough, sexual interest is quite overwhelmed by them. This may even be the beginning of a memorable bad trip.

Beethoven's music, I think, is often like that. Just when you think you recognize the pattern in his creative acts, he surprises you by a variation. Is that, maybe, why we sometimes feel such music is closer to experienced reality than any theory we can devise?

Which would you consider more real — the abstract Architect's floor plan — which shows something nobody ever sees in experience but which all can agree serves a useful function — or the various drawings from individual perspectives, which show the plural realities that people actually see, but which have no practical function?

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. – John C. Lilly, M.D., The Center of the Cyclone

Did something unique happen physically, or was it "only" psychological? As long as the experience was truly overwhelming for the participants, what purpose can such a question serve? (After all, happiness, bravery, zest and all the other desirable qualities can also be explained away as "only" psychological.)

But in considering the above experiments, I feel we need to accept some sort of post-modernism, or at least some of the "neurological relativism" I preach in all my books. The instrument that measures all other instruments — the human nervous system — has its own laws, and one of them involves always seeing the results one wants to see until and unless something really startles the brain enough to reframe its experiences.

Somehow, to me at least, either of those logics seem to fit the enigmas of our existence, here in the cock-eyed room of primate perceptor organs, better than Aristotelian yes/no choices. Of course, if after long analysis, some experiences can finally be reduced to an Aristotelian choice, that is convenient. But starting from the Aristotelian either/or may be rather constricting or strangulating.

Dr. John Lilly says, "In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.

We've already pointed out, in Chapter One, that matter was originally a synergetic or holistic concept, including the observer, and not a reified or thingified Substance outside us — it meant, originally, that which we experience in making a measurement, remember? — and, in this connection, what do you suppose fact meant originally?

The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the "tickets" or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)

Some lucky souls jump to Circuit V bliss without passing through the horrors of "chemicalization" and the "Dark Night of the Soul.

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits . . .

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

In San Francisco I read a review of John Huston's recent movie, Victory, which described it as exciting. In the Irish Tribune yesterday I read another review which described it as dull. Is the excitement or dullness in the movie, or was it in the nervous systems of the reviewers?

It only takes a few weeks in prison to become "a convict," whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a few weeks in the Army to become a "soldier.

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know.

I don't think Hawk or I are operating on emotional whim. It's just the way we experience things sometimes needs to get translated sort of promptly into a, ah, course of action. So we have tended to bypass the meditative circuit." "Wow," Hawk said.