Quotes About Reality

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

To rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality.

Here and now, boys.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

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

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

What I'm going to tell you now, he said, may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.

What fun it would be if one didn't have to think about happiness! - From Brave New World

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

The truth does not cease to exist because it's ignored.

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.