“Underlying the ultra-conservative’s paranoia is his inability to enter into subsets of reality play other than his own. Once he has modified to a world view he is frozen into it. Alien views become threats to his very universe.”
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By Joseph Chilton Pearce
“Our inherited representation, our world view, is a language-made affair. It varies from culture to culture. Edward Sapir, the linguist, called this idea of ours that we adjust to reality without the use of language an illusion. He claimed that the “real world” is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.”
“…our ‘semantic universe,’ as Lévi-Strauss has called our word-built world.”
“Autistic thinking can only be defined in a roundabout way. For instance, a pianist friend told me of the following experience, the most impressive of his life. His favorite work, one he had lived with for years, was Mozart’s last sonata, K576, the one written after the composer’s late discovery of Bach. My friend was giving a concert one evening, and was scheduled to play this sonata. Just before commencing, he leaned back for a moment to sense the mood of that contrapuntal texture, and was struck anew by its exquisiteness and his love of it. At that moment, in a single frozen instant out of time, he ‘experienced’ the sonata. Every note, phrase, nuance, shadow and line formed in an ethereal circle of perfection for him. He described it as a volume, a sort of universal whole, perfect, far more than human, and happening to him as something unique and totally outside of himself. Though it had occupied only a second, the occurrence was immeasurable by any kind of time, and was numinous and profound.”
“One Yogic activity was the production of a tulpa, a phantasm, or imaginary person. The production was a slow development which could itself only be undertaken in a mature stage of training. Eventually the tulpa creation would begin to form and take on aspects of reality for the subject-creator.”
“Is there an ‘exact image’ of a physical world? Consider even photography. The same subject can be hideous or lovely according to the skill of the photographer. Photography is an art because it can catch aspects of reality that escape us, precisely as painting can do. I can traverse the same tired street year in and year out, familiar with every twig and stone–but a photographer can suddenly present me with a photograph of it that makes me catch my breath much as from a poem or a piece of music. I refuse to believe the ‘police lineup’ photograph on my driver’s license is my real image; as with all aspects of the police mentality it somehow has sought out the worst possible aspects of me.”
“The Worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.” (quoting William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
“Speech is radically discontinuous with those life forms leading up to it. Speech serves no adaptive purpose, no ‘pair-group’ survival function, as the naive realists claim. Yet speech was developed by life, and its purpose can be understood from its real function, a function . . . slowly being grasped by others.”
“Underlying the ultra-conservative’s paranoia is his inability to enter into subsets of reality play other than his own. Once he has modified to a world view he is frozen into it. Alien views become threats to his very universe.”
“Back in the mid-thirties, a German told Tom Wolfe that Germany was caught on a fast train with a madman at the throttle. To jump off seemed suicide, to stay on even worse. . . . The German was right. To stay on the train is madness, to leap from it suicide. But there is still a Way–a narrow hard Way, a difficult crack between the worlds where, losing your life, you can find it. Therein might lie the only hope for the train itself, improbable as the notion sounds.”
“The crack in the egg is sought by Jesus to restructure some specific problem area in ordinary reality. His system works only in relationships between people. His non-ordinary states are created as shared states by the constant focus on the needs of the other. No isolation is engendered. Two or three can gather together and reach a non-ordinary consensus, a point of agreement different from that of the ordinary world.”
“Reality-adjusted thinking was Jesus’ point of departure. He did not break with logic or ‘law,’ the reasoning functions of mind. He spoke of perfecting logic in order to go beyond it. His child-metaphors have meaning only against an adult background. The first demand he makes is that the ego-centered, reality-thinking personality must be surrendered. Unless you hate your life you cannot follow where he goes–not just because ambiguity would result from trying to hold two orientations at once; more, unless you are willing to give up your world view structured from infancy, those concepts directing your percepts cannot be restructured.”
“Our leaders, placed in positions of power, immediately succumb to that power and speak of ‘dealing from positions of strength,’ which translates into power over and against–a desire to be God. The great hopefulness exhibited by that long-gone America of the Marshall Plan and the young United Nations, moving for others as the best protections for ourselves has been eclipsed in a mirroring of our adversary’s paranoia. Now we find that it is we ourselves, not that perpetual enemy, who are considered the ‘nightmare of the world,’ as Toynbee plainly called us.”
“The whole experiment is a gesture toward bridging the modes of mind, and the results could reach beyond science fiction. We may yet see the day when the tragedy of school is overcome.”
–excerpts from The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality by Joseph Chilton Pearce