Our linguistic habits lead us into error...we are apt to say,
"I imagine," when what we should have said is, "The curtain was lifted that I might see."

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





We row around an anvil-shaped butte called Turk's Head. Hard to see any reason for the name. Is there any reason, out here, for any name? These huge walls and giant towers and vast mazy avenues of stone resist attempts at verbal reduction. The historical view, the geological view, the esthetical view, the rock climber's view, give us only aspects of a massive PRESENCE that remains fundamentally unknowable. The world is big and it is incomprehensible.

EDWARD ABBEY
DOWN THE RIVER





Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION





All discovery is metaphorical.

W. T. JONES




The naming of things is a useful mnemonic device, enabling us to distinguish and utilize and remember what otherwise might remain an undifferentiated sensory blur, but I don't think names tell us much of character, essence, meaning. Einstein thought the most mysterious aspect of the universe...is what he called its "comprehensibility." Being primarily a mathematician and only secondarily a violinist, Einstein saw the world as comprehensible because so many of its properties and so much of its behavior can be described through mathematical formulas. The atomic bomb and Hiroshima made a convincing argument for his point of view....Even so, I find something narrow and too specialized in Einstein's summary of the situation. The specialist's viewpoint may go deep but it cannot go all the way through. How could it if the world, though finite, is unbounded? Nor does its practical utility---atomic bombs---make up for its lack of breadth. All special theories suffer from this defect. The lizard sunning itself on a stone would no doubt tell us that time, space, sun, and earth exist to serve the lizard's interests; the lizard, too, must see the world as perfectly comprehensible, reducible to a rational formula. Relative to the context, the lizard's metaphysical system seems as complete as Einstein's....to me the most mysterious thing about the universe is not its comprehensibility but the fact that it exists.

EDWARD ABBEY
DOWN THE RIVER





Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply."

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION



A monk asked: "In admitting phenomenon, what is true?"
The Master said: "Phenomenon is truth and truth is phenomenon."
The monk asked: "How is that revealed?"
The Master lifted the tea tray.

Ch'an koan
SOURCES OF CHINESE TRADITION



Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up---the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and sub-atomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





"Well I know," said his host, "that many brave knights dwell with the Grail at Munsalvaesche. Always when they ride out, as they often do, it is to seek adventure. They do so for their sins, these templars, whether their reward be defeat or victory. A valiant host lives there, and I will tell you how they are sustained. They live from a stone of the purest kind. If you do not know it, it shall here be named to you. It is called LAPSIT EXILLIS. By the power of that stone the phoenix burns to ashes, but the ashes give him life again. Thus does the phoenix molt and change its plumage, which afterward is bright and shining and as lovely as before....The stone is also called the Grail."

WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH
PARZIVAL





The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION




Look at a newspaper photograph through a magnifying glass. All you will see are black and white dots. Remove the magnifying glass---you have a picture of a child laughing, and you can see the expression on the child's face. Look at it again through the magnifying glass. How can those crude dots---and so few of them---produce that subtle expression? If Martians were the size of fleas, and a Martian could walk over the page and look at the photograph, he would assure you that you are merely imagining that you can see the child's expression. These black and white dots cannot have an expression.

We also see the world 'close up', and we can see it is made up of mere objects, like stones and trees and houses. Staring at it, we say: 'It cannot possibly reveal any more to ANYONE than it is now revealing to me. Anyone who says so is letting his imagination run away with him.'

COLIN WILSON
THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE





If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU



...in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet....Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION





Who will prefer the jingle of jade pendants if
He once has heard stone growing in a cliff...

LAO TZU
TAO TEH CHING