Sublime

Perception, the neuroscientist Anil Seth writes, is “a generative, creative act.” It is “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality.”

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do

Blaine still works intently on card tricks, of the more avant-garde kind that derive from the great Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, whom all magicians today, on all sides, uncritically revere.

At Ojai, in April, four hour-long discussions took place on ‘The Nature of the Mind’ between K, David Bohm, Dr John Hidley, a psychiatrist in private practice in Ojai, and Rupert Sheldrake, who was at that time a consultant to the International Crops Institute in Hyderabad. These discussions, video taped in colour, had been sponsored by the Robert

This master of chemistry . . . emerged from his experience with LSD-25 convinced the molecule offered civilization not only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm – by opening a crack ‘in the edifice of materialistic rationality’.

All perception is metaphor—as Wittgenstein put it, we never merely see, we always “see as.”

The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders.