Quotes About Reality

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.

Those who have had similar forbidden perceptions will have a certain sympathy for Mr. Devereux. I continue to maintain that Fundamentalist Materialism, like other Fundamentalisms, is, or appears within psychological models to be, a defense mechanism, and within neurological models, an editing-out device, to stave off the shock and sense of conceptual rape that causes the unsophisticated to panic when confronted with wonder about the nature of Reality.

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves . . . whether you are living in a Christian reality-tunnel, a Mansonoid reality-tunnel, an Immortalist reality-tunnel, a vegetarian reality-tunnel, a Rationalist reality-tunnel . . .

But whatever the source of this worldwide legend, the psychological fact to which it attests is obvious: people can imagine an ideal condition of happiness, but are usually not capable of imagining that they, personally, are able to achieve that ideal. There is everywhere a consciousness of some gate, or door, or barrier, between desire and reality. Men and women everywhere tend to feel partially impotent and incapable of achieving what they want to achieve.

We have manufactured all "material things" out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, "From the beginning, there has never been a 'thing.'")

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.)

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't," Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

4. Accept this book, if not in whole at least in general outlines. Assume you have been brainwashed. Try to learn as much from every human you meet about their separate reality-tunnel and see how much of it you can use to make your reality-tunnel bigger and more inclusive. In other words, learn to listen.

Phenomenological sociology owes a great deal to Husserl and Huizinga, and to Existentialism. Denying abstract or Platonic reality (singular) the social scientists of this school recognize only social realities (plural) defined by human interactions and game-rules, and limited by the computational abilities of the human nervous system.

And I repeat that we might all become startlingly sane, or at least much less stupid, if we tried, even occasionally, to look dispassionately and without prejudice at precisely those events which do not seem to fit our own favorite reality-tunnel or tunnels.

Or maybe the universe has wobbles and weirdness indeed. Maybe belief in any system is maintained by forgetting all data that does not fit the system?

It is not nonsense. We are merely confronting infinity where we least expected to encounter it — in our own lonely selves.

The only sensible goal, then, is to try to build a reality-tunnel for next week that is bigger, funnier, sexier, more optimistic and generally less boring than any previous reality-tunnel.

It now appears that we may have a more complete quantum theory at hand, one that includes Hidden Variables. However, at this point, that does not mean we have found deep reality and can junk the Copenhagen Interpretation. It simply means that we have another new model — which implies, for most physicists, another argument for model agnosticism or zeteticism.

If you believe in it, you can almost see it. Or, at least, you can convince yourself that anything else is mere appearance or hallucination.

REALITY" IS THE TEMPORARY RESULTANT OF CONTINUOUS STRUGGLES BETWEEN RIVAL GANGS OF PROGRAMMERS.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

When a paradigm shift occurs — when we go from seeing things one way to seeing them another way — the whole world is remade. All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts — as Sir Humphry Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

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 . . .