Quotes About Illusion

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.

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

It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a fact is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.

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.* ~•~

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.

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.

It is even more amusing to remember that an orange is really sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue — blue is conducted through its skin. We see orange precisely because there is no orange in the fruit — because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The substance or isness of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see.

She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.

Kind of makes me wonder. George Lucas, as noted earlier, could fake this on film, but I don't know of any existing technology that would fake it in several parts of a "real," "solid" town.

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?

We have manufactured all "material things" out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, "From the beginning, there has never been a 'thing.'")

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

If you believe in it, you can almost see it. Or, at least, you can convince yourself that anything else is mere appearance or hallucination.

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.?

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear.

If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as only appearances, or as misperceptions.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.

The magician knows that in an information-overload situation, spectators only see what they came prepared to see.