“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled 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. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”
Quote by Aldous Huxley
Work
The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Browse quotes and source details for this work. more
Author
You May Also Like
Source: Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World
Source: The Humans
“Oh, but it's our tears that make us human, Isabel.”
Source: Secrets of a Charmed Life
“Human interaction. The most complicated form of happiness I will never figure out.”
Source: Love Letters to the Dead
“Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.”
Source: Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Source: Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
“Empire always overreaches itself and thus dies by its own hand victim of its own ambitions”
Source: Sriuba
Source: Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World
