The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion?... So let's call it "theophorin"... What could the selective advantage of theophorin be?... to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.
“Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.”
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 221
Context: Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.
To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.
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Muriel Rukeyser 42
poet and political activist 1913–1980Related quotes
Statement of mid-1920'; as quoted in Abstract Art (1990) by Anna Moszynska, p. 100
1921 - 1930
“When you experience things completely, then you know what they are.”
Heart Sutra Workshop http://www.unfetteredmind.org/heart-sutra-commentary-3. Unfettered Mind http://unfetteredmind.org. (2008-09-13). (Topic: Awareness)
Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption. I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy my admission to others by engaging their interests and feelings, doing the least possible damage to my feelings and interests but changing theirs a bit. I think I was not aware early on of those things. I wrote early on because it was there to do and because if anything good happened in the poem I felt good. Poems are experiences as well as whatever else they are, and for me now, nothing, not respect, honor, money, seems as supportive as just having produced a body of work, which I hope is, all considered, good.
Chap. 2 : Experience and Its Modes
Experience and Its Modes (1933)