Quotes About Understanding

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

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 book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.—Lichtenstein. Does that refer to one book only, or to all books?

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.

In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.

Dr. Isaac Asimov notes in his Genetic Code that there seems to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new scientific principle and the transformation of the world by that principle.

One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain listened calmly and commented, You have the words, my dear, but you haven't got the music yet.

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word water, and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the ink-stains that form the word water on this page or the sound waves produced when I say water aloud. If you say, The word is not the thing, everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred really is Sacred and something called Junk really is Junk.

Words do not equal in space-time the things or events they denote, yet people react to a choice between words as if making a choice between real things or events in the existential world.

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.

The reader terrorized by mathematics (persuaded by incompetent teachers that I can't understand that stuff) need not panic.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.

To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing.

We can talk meaningfully about the tuned-in but not about the not-yet-tuned-in.

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

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.)

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.

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.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

The only drug I have ever been addicted to was nicotine, which I have quit five times in the last 20 years. Speaking from experience, I must say that Crowley has great understanding of the addict mentality and the way the biological need for the drug can generate "reasons" that almost seem rational at the time. Writing down the reasons for taking another cigarette, Crowley fashion, I have found is a real help in recognizing their self-deceiving quality and really quitting.

Consider the child's riddle, Where does your fist go when you open your hand? This can be answered by thinking like Einstein, although on a less cosmic scale. That is, the child must first realize that the fist is not a thing but a relationship (a coherent synergy Bucky Fuller would say). It is not a mere etymological felicity to say that thinking of relations is the first step to thinking Relativistically.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).