The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.
“The question of consciousness has always intrigued me. It starts with the question, 'Are we our bodies or are we our consciousness? What are we made up of?”
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Gene Roddenberry 27
American television screenwriter and producer 1921–1991Related quotes
"A Matter of the Soul" (1975), pp. 75-76
It All Adds Up (1994)
Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
On writing poetry in “Gregory Pardlo: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/gregory-pardlo-how-i-write/ in The Writer (2019 Jul 17)
Book I, Chapter 1, p. 23
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)