Quotes About Illusion

I had the unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part was something wildly different from what it appeared to be...

He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart . . . no matter what the merciless hours have done.

The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rather than the female, murdered sex in your country.

I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be - like discovering that your own mother isn't anyone you've ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski , the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts , a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal.

Of course there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?

Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.

the distinction between magick and communication exits only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

How about the Federal Reserve, then, which has convinced millions that the paper it prints "is" "real" "money"? Prank or fraud? Or perhaps some species of magick that only other sorcerers can understand?

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

If you look at your watch, realize you still don't know the time, and look again, were you strictly speaking awake the first time you looked?

In the Real Universe we are re-active mechanisms; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The Real Universe is just another of our creations — a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us.

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:

Once you have given up asking "what day is it?" you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really "is." Then, in Melville's fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don't believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil's masquerade.

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.

If we consider Clifford Irving's Fake! a fake itself — a fake biography of a fake painter, revealing only what the faker, or fakers, care to reveal, and dumping a great deal of disinformation on us in the process — then we must regard Orson Welles' F For Fake as a fake movie about a fake biography of a fake painter. But perhaps we would more accurately dub it a fake documentary about the impossibility of ever making a "true" documentary.

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

Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level.

Almost all cigarette smokers, for instance, have a favorite brand and insist that they cannot be satisfied by any other brand. When blindfolded, however, they cannot distinguish this favorite brand from any other brand. They are not buying the cigarettes but buying the package. The same is true of most beer drinkers: they have a favorite brand, but cannot distinguish it from other brands when blindfolded.

No matter," said Pablo with the dignity of a great magician. "I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.

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.