We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Istigkeit wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness."
The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where? _How far?
How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.
Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not produc-tive.
The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused this mass of largely useless and irrelevant information.
To make biological 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. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.
Meaningfulness of naked experience
One was my wife, the other a man I re spected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me
It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things.