“It's all real and it's all illusory:
that's Awareness!”

What Is Reality?

Saanen, Switzerland (5 August 1973)
1970s
Context: Now, one sees all that by observing, by being aware, watching, one is aware of all this. Then out of that awareness you see there is no division between the observer and the observed. It is a trick of thought which demands security. Please don't madam, please. And by being aware it sees the observer is the observed, that violence is the observer, violence is not different from the observer. Now how is the observer to end himself and not be violent? Have you understood my question so far? I think so. Right? The observer is the observed, there is no division and therefore no conflict. And is the observer then, knowing all the intricacies of naming, linguistically caught in the image of violence, what happens to that violence? If the observer is violent, can the observer end, otherwise violence will go on? Can the observer end himself, because he is violent? Or what reality has the observer? Right sir? Is he merely put together by words, by experience, by knowledge? So is he put together by the past? So is he the past? Right? Which means the mind is living in the past. Right? obviously. You are living in the past. Right? No? As long as there is an observer there must be living in the past, obviously. And all our life is based on the past, memories, knowledge, images, according to which you react, which is your conditioning, is the past. And living has become the living of the past in the present, modified in the future. That's all, as long as the observer is living. Now does the mind see this as a truth, as a reality, that all my life is living in the past? I may paint most abstract pictures, write the most modern poems, invent the most extraordinary machinery, but I am still living in the past.

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- Disavowal of transcendence, p. 84 -->
Context: Exclusive manipulation results in the dissolution of awareness of all transcendence. Promise becomes a pretext, God becomes a symbol, truth a fiction, loyalty tentative, the holy a mere convention. Man’s very existence devours all transcendence. Instead of facing the grandeur of the cosmos, he explains it away; instead of beholding, he takes a picture; instead of hearing a voice, he tapes it. He does not see what he is able to face. There is a suspension of man’s sense of the holy. His mind is becoming a wall instead of being a door open to what is larger than the scope of his comprehension. He locks himself out of the world by reducing all reality to mere things and all relationship to mere manipulation. Transcendence is not an article of faith. It is what we come upon immediately when standing face to face with reality.

Hell Is the Absence of God; first appeared in Starlight 3, 2001.
Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Source: The Tenth Man

Direct Art Magazine, "In Memoriam - Eugene James Martin", Fall-Winter 2006,Vol. 13, p. 86, http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist/details.php?id=791 and http://afonline.artistsspace.org/view_artist.php?aid=3883

VALIS (1981)
Context: We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.