Quotes About Existence

ago he had made a pact with himself to postulate a created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days—since each hypothesis, whole paradoxical, avoided the paradoxes of the other—with a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery.

Eh? I don't grok your answer." Mike hesitated. "I will try. But words are . . . are not . . . rightly. Not 'putting.' Not 'mading.' A nowing, World is. World was. World shall be. Now." " 'As it was in the beginning, so it is now and ever shall be, World without end—

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!

A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.

If God existed (concerning which Jubal maintained neutrality) and if He wanted to be worshipped (a proposition which Jubal found improbable but nevertheless possible in the light of his own ignorance), then it seemed wildly unlikely that a God potent to shape galaxies would be swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered as "worship." But

Thou are God," Mike repeated serenely. "That which groks. Anne is God. I am God. The happy grasses are God. Jill groks in beauty always. Jill is God. All shaping and making and creating together—" He croaked something in Martian and smiled.

He knew that he did not invent the information brought to him by his senses. There had to be something else out there, some otherness that produced the things his senses recorded. All philosophies that claimed that the physical world around him did not exist except in his imagination were sheer nonsense. But

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Miracles, like all other things, he said, come out of the Void for no reason and return to the Void for no reason. Wait. Be patient. Pay attention to the little details. And see what comes out of the Void next.

Persinger and Lafreniere: We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

The tenth planet beyond Pluto, in this instance, will be discovered, or won't be discovered, when the space telescope goes into orbit in the near future. The existence of advanced life-forms beyond Earth may not be verified or refuted for a thousand years or longer — or it may be verified tomorrow, if the Space Brothers beloved in UFO lore suddenly land en masse — but at present it remains similarly indeterminate.

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.

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.

Who is the Master who makes the grass green? (Zen koan)

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

Pure Reason, however, derives from axioms which can neither be proven nor disproven. These axioms appear in consciousness from a level of pre-logical apprehension in which we might as well be gesticulating and pointing — or waving sticks in the air like Zen Masters — instead of talking, because we are trying to indicate or invoke something that exists before words and categories.

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

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.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.