Quotes About Interpretation

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Once we become sensitive to dreams, we discover that every dynamic in a dream is manifesting itself in some way in our practical lives

The Hebrew imagination, we might note, was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

G.W.F. Hegel . He's perfect, Weishaupt wrote.... Unlike Kant , who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

If it were Hegel , I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

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.

Van Gogh could see 28 shades of black. Why?

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed brutally realistic then, now seems a little quaint and unreal in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call model agnosticism, not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.

The fruit is orange, to ordinary perception. The fruit is not orange, to Galileo's analysis. The fruit is both orange and not-orange, to those who recognize that the existential and the scientific grids each have a kind of validity. The fruit is neither orange nor not-orange, to those who recognize that all grids are human inventions.

It is a well-known idea, not just among mystics, but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers?

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?

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.

If we never describe anything as it is but only as it appears to our minds, we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .

In short, we don't need to postulate a supernatural Designer. Our experiments create the universe observed by our experiments — which when interpreted always yield an Anthropic universe, rather than any of the millions or billions of possible non-Anthropic universes — because we designed the experiments.

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

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.

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.