Quotes About Awareness

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.

As usual, when you look for synchronicity, synchronicity looks for you.

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

To Buddhist Tibet, this is the unity of yab and yum; to Taoist China, the unity of yin and yang. The Occident perennially seeks to repress this thought, and perennially is haunted by half-awareness of it.

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

So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of "is" and "all" and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

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.

According to Alfred Korzybski, any "idea" or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher-ordering process; it is the "Infinity Within" of which mystics speak.

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.

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.

Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.

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

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.

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.

There are a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

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).

We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.

When mystics etc. talk about ordinary consciousness as sleep, dream, illusion, etc., are they talking about something very esoteric that only other mystics can understand? Or are they talking about the extent to which normal consciousness (mechanical consciousness in my sense) relates to fictitious predicates attached to groups and ignores (does not perceive) person1, person2, etc.?

Is there some connection between waking up in the mystic sense, and learning to read (or to see paintings, say) in an alert, non-mechanical way? One Zen master, when asked what Zen is, always replied with the single word, Attention. What the hell did he mean?

The unconscious Joyce represents is not merely an area within the brains of his creatures. It is a network of connections through time and space that extends beyond any awareness but the most absolute.

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.

Colin Wilson argues that when we say, Life is boring and meaningless, it means that we are boring and meaningless. Can there be any truth in this?