Quotes About Perspective

He said after reading Illuminatus! he laughed so much that he got over his paranoia.

Must have been dual hallucination. If one person sees a blasphemy, that is simple hallucination. Two people — dual hallucination. Many, many people — mass hallucination

I congratulated him on his perceptivity. Indeed, that is one of my major messages, in everything I write — our emic realities are programmed by our expectations. You are the Master who makes the grass green.

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?

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet – thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.* ~•~

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

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.

So there we are. Aldous Huxley, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. John Lilly, philosopher Alan Watts and several other recent theorists have used this metaphor and this argument, usually without knowing that they were echoing Aleister Crowley.

The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist.

I avoid making sentences with "is" or its relatives in them because all such sentences have definite semantic defects, the first of which consists in the fact that they make it appear as if one has reached the unreachable 1/1 of proven truth, when in fact one usually only has strong maybe, and (especially in politics and Ideology) sometimes only a weak maybe.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events". NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

Moral: Hang on to your Elmyrs, folks. They, too, may become Historical Curiosities. And remember: a counterfeit dollar, hung in a museum as found art by Andy Warhol, will have a value in the hundreds of thousands, whereas a "real" dollar, blessed by the Wizards in the Federal Reserve, will retain its meager face value until inflation reduces it even further.

Like most other experimenters he found only and always what he looked for.

I think it might help to regard this UFO, not as an external event () or a human hallucination () but as the synergetic product () of event-plus-human-interpretation.

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men become giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose the lesser of two evils, and accept congenial hallucination, rather than — Chaos and the Abyss.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

I am merely suggesting, playfully at times, maybe seriously at other times, that Universe is a bit more complicated than anybody's models; and that using several reality-tunnels — as in Po or quantum mechanics — may show a great many interesting correlations and details and exciting and beautiful aspects that we will never see if we look always and only through one monotonous reality-tunnel which we have made into an Idol.

The perspective of anthropology and of ethnomethodology, and of this book, is like the perspective of a cosmopolitan art critic. It asks us to try many reality-windows instead of standing hypnotized at our habitual window all our lives.

It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?