I reach into the shadows behind the screen and retrieve a small, semi-transparent plastic bucket. I dip into the bucket and fish out a human brain. I have no idea to whom the brain belonged. I can't tell if it's male or female, black or white, or, with and reliability, its age. I may even have passed this person on the street. In its natural state, encased within the skull, brain matter is gelatinous. This brain, fixed in formalin, has a solid, rubbery feel and would carve like a very tender tuna steak...

...When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon and brought back pictures of our planet of oceans and clouds hanging over a grey moonscape in the middle of a black nowhere, it changed the way we saw ourselves. We knew already that we inhabited the surface of a small, spinning sphere that rolled around an ordinary star, at the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, just one of indeterminate billions in a vast, indifferent cosmos. But now, occupying a few degrees of retinal space, comfortably absorbed in the folds of the visual cortex, a mere portion of the visual field, we saw our home in its true colours. It was precious and vulnerable, a small fragile object, a thing we should take care of. It was, indeed, our home. We might have extrapolated these sentiments from the knowledge we already possessed, but the images set off an interplay of intellect and imagination that made the new perspective irresistible.

Something similar happens when you see the brain. Imagination infiltrates intellect. You get a sense of location and venerability. Our home...

...Like the surface of the Earth, the brain is pretty much mapped. There are no secret compartments inaccessible to the surgeon's knife or the magnetic gaze of the brain scanner; no mysterious humours pervading the cerebral ventricles, no soul in the pineal gland, no vital spark, no spirits in the tangled wood. There is nothing you can't touch or squeeze, weigh and measure, as we might the physical properties of other objects. So you will search in vain for any semblance of a self within the structures of the brain: there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact. But, somehow, we are the product of the operation of this machinery and its progress through the physical and social world.

Minds emerge from process and interaction, no substance. In a sense, we inhabit the spaces between things. We subsist in emptiness. A beautiful, liberating, thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by comparison.

Extract from Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks

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On The Solar Anus:

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form... all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth... They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.

[...]

The planetary systems that turn in space like rigid disks, and whose centres also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return to it, completing their rotation. Movement is the figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.

On The Big Toe:

The interest of philosophy resides in the fact that, in opposition to science or common sense, it must positively envisage the waste products of intellectual; appropriation. Nevertheless, it most often envisages these waste products only in abstract forms of totality (nothingness, infinity, the absolute), to which it itself cannot give a positive content; it can thus freely proceed in speculations that more or less have as a goal, all things considered, the sufficient identification of an endless world with a finite world, and unknowable (noumenal) world with the known world.... God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stages of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity.

On The Labyrinth:

MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach... Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want – outside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me. Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, which has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter... Being attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall it unleashes, a representation of death is cynically recognised. It is not only the composition of elements that constitutes the incandescence of being, but its decomposition in its mortal form.

On The Sacred Conspiracy:

Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes empty or neutral and, if it is free, it is in play.

Extracts taken from
'Visions of Excess' [UK / US] by Georges Bataille

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On Confrontation

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

~ Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes

On Suffering

If imagination is used within the limits laid down by science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry would present itself, and each of them would show itself to be the logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that Amor intellectualis Dei, the beatific vision of the vita contemplativa, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable sufferings, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animal-cules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.

~ Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity

On Dichotomy

Whether the world subsists by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or an intelligent Nature presides over it, let this be laid down as a maxim, that I am a part of a whole, governed by its own nature…. I shall never be displeased with whatever is allotted me by that whole... Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted to us by fate, and leave the world contentedly, like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

On Truth

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

~ Isaac Newton

All quotes taken from Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion

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There are things which by their very nature are so dependant upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist... Humankind is almost pure potential as it emerges from the formative hand of nature. Humans must develop that potential and complete their formation... in brief, humankind must... be its own second creator.

~ Christoph Martin Wieland, Werke I-III. München: Hanser 1964-1967

For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate enfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite – that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.

~ David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity.

~ John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In man creature and creator are united: in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day...

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"This circle;" he said, "which the blotter has made into a point invaded by night, is God." ... "An accident," he said, "may suddenly transform the infinite into infinite worlds whose interrelation we cannot define, but which we nevertheless sense."
...All other life ceases in the life put into words.

~ Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions : El, or the Last Book

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, The Theologians

On the Nature of a Multitude...

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On God

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not Omnipotent.
Is he able but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is God both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

~ Epicurus

On Monism

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that which is not ‘body’ is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.

~ Thomas Hobbes

On Creation

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them and that custom respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests.

~ Baron d’Holbach

On Reason

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the reasoning of a single individual

~ Galileo Galilei

On Foundations

"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion."
~ George Washington

"I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature."
~ Thomas Jefferson

"The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion."
~ Abraham Lincoln

"A just government has no need for the clergy or the church."
~ James Madison

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice."
~ John F. Kennedy

"The United States is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles and beliefs."
~ George W. Bush

On Behalf of...

I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?

~ Homer Simpson

For a detailed history of Religious Reflection
on The Huge Entity see here...

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On Past

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

On Memory

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

On Knowledge

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

On Conversion

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

On Truth

Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.

All quotes attributed to Walter Benjamin

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'Tis a strange place, this Limbo !--not a Place,
Yet name it so ;--where Time & weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mair sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being ;--
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,--unmeaning they
As Moonlight on the dial of the day !
But that is lovely--looks like Human Time,--

An Old Man with a steady Look sublime,
That stops his earthly Task to watch the skies ;
But he is blind--a Statue hath such Eyes ;--
Yet having moon-ward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald & high,
He gazes still,--his eyeless Face all Eye ;--
As 'twere an organ full of silent Sight,
His whole Face seemeth to rejoice in Light !
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb,
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

Extract from Limbo by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam...

...The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds...

...Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Extract from Pale Blue Dot (US / UK) by Carl Sagan

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Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

- Albert Einstein

(Via Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves by Cliff Pickover)

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Abstractions abound here on The Huge Entity. Thoughts multiply, recombine and surface anew as entities of shimmering complexity. After some of these thoughts grow shadows, luminous and independant, awaiting their own responses; dealing in their own echoes with which new thoughts will be manifested. Sometimes these thoughts were better formed elsewhere. Greater clarity throughout history, within culture, no more can be found. Today Borges will enhance our abstractions. His works are no mere fictions, they are tools which better focus this world. Absorb them here...

On the Infinity of The Aleph:

Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained within it, with no diminution in size. Each thing, (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.

I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I'd seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand ... saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn't get all scrambled up), saw simultaneous night and day ... saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shop window in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, armies, saw all the ants on the earth ... saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

Taken from The Aleph (and other stories)

On the Infinite Library of Babel:

The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

I have just written the word 'infinite', I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

Taken from Labyrinths

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The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subjects during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word...

William Burroughs - The Ticket That Exploded

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"With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae wasp with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can..."

Extract from a letter to Minister Asa Gray,
written by Charles Darwin, May 22, 1860

Thanks also to The Nonist!
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...a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice - inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome...

In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there - that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck...

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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On race

We're all colored, or you wouldn't be able to see anyone.

On mental health

The largest living land mammal is the absent mind.

On perspective

I think most people try to get others to see through their eyes. And if you look through enough eyes, like in books, you end up not knowing how to use your own eyes. Then you have to be started by something. It all has to do with The One. People can't realize that a One is really a Zero split in half. It's like splitting the world in two; choosing up sides.

On society

A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond.

On reality

The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter.

All quotes by Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)

Explore his genius at further at The Captain Beefheart Radar Station

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On the Exile of Mankind

The people became numerous...
The god was depressed by their uproar
Enil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome...

- from the ancient Sumerian epic Atrahasis

Having come from the light and from the Gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.

- Fragment of Turfa 'n M7 (Fictional text cited in Umberto Eco's, Foucault's Pendulum)

On Transcending Elitism

These texts are not addressed to common mortals.... Gnostic perception is a path reserved for an elite... For, in the words of the Bible: Do not cast your pearls before the swine.

- Kamal Jumblatt, Interview in Le Jour, March 31, 1967

For who would lose,
Though full of pain,
this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night...

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

On Reinterpreting Reality

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have a sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.

- Karen Armstrong, A history of God

But still, we must realize that the universe although kind to us in its entirety (it must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, "otherwise nature would have executed us long ago") does contain grinning evil masks which loom out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain.

- Philip K. Dick, Man, Android and Machine

On Exponentially Realised Complexity

I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man—even a single man, tens of centuries ago—has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Library of Babel

Somewhere in that great ocean of truth, the answers to questions about life in the universe are hidden....Beyond these questions are others that we cannot even ask, questions about the universe as it may be perceived in the future by minds whose thoughts and feelings are as inaccessible to us as our thoughts and feelings are inaccessible to earthworms. The potentialities of life and intelligence in the universe go far beyond anything that humans can imagine. Theology should begin by recognizing the vastness of the ocean of truth and the pettiness of our search for smoother pebbles.

- Freeman Dyson, Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight

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"O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all..."

Excerpt The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

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"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature."

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On Duality:

"...out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings." - Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

On Denial:

"We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency." - Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity

On Nihilism:

"Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness." - George Orwell, Can Socialists Be Happy

On Perpetuity:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." - Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

On The Deus Ex Machina:

"Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream." - Chuang-Tzu, The Wandering Dance

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On Imagination:

Midsummer Night's Dream - Act v. Sc. 1.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

On Memory:

Macbeth - Act v. Sc. 3.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

On Denial:

Richard III - Act i. Sc. 3.

Oh, who can... cloy the hungry edge of appetite,
By bare imagination of a feast?

Macbeth - Act i. Sc. 3.

Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.

On Illusion:

Macbeth - Act ii. Sc. 1.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee;
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.

On The Self:

The Tempest - Act iv. Sc. 1.

Our revels are now ended.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air..
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Some quotes taken from V.S. Ramachandran's enthralling book 'Phantoms in the Brain'. Other's found at Project Gutenberg. (Incidentally, click the playing cards to see the whole Shakespearean deck...)

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On epileptically induced ecstasy:

"There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly...."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

On drug induced hallucination:

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

On attaining religious experience:

"This task is so exacting and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality."

Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

On these realities and more:

"The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. "

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

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