Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: Who knows what schools will be like twenty-five years from now? Or fifty? In time, the type of student who is currently a failure may be considered a success. The type who is now successful may be regarded as a handicapped learner — slow to respond, far too detached, lacking in emotion, inadequate in creating mental pictures of reality. Consider: what Thamus called the "conceit of wisdom" — the unreal knowledge acquired through the written word — eventually became the pre-eminent form of knowledge valued by the schools. There is no reason to suppose that such a form of knowledge must always remain so highly valued.
Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, How expression may be given to a picture, p. 33
Quote of Severine 1913, from the opening paragraphs of his text 'Art du fantastique dans le sacre', as cited in Gino Severini Ecrits sur l'art, (1913-1962), with a preface by Serge Fauchereau, (Paris: Editions Cercle d'Art, 1987), p. 47
Severini opens 'Art du fantastique' with a theoretical explanation of the concept, form and content of a Futurist work
The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)
“I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”
Statement to John Burns of The New York Times among his last words to western reporters before going on administrative leave (9 April 2003), as quoted in Politics and Propaganda : Weapons of Mass Seduction (2004) by Nicholas J. O'Shaughnessy, p. 233
Ch. 11 : LSD Experience and Reality http://www.psychedelic-library.org/child11.htm
LSD : My Problem Child (1980)
Context: Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as "the reality," including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous — that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.
One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations.
Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank.
Source: The Reader's digest vol. 140, no. 837-842 (1992), p. 159
