“Some may wonder whether part of the harvest of this invisible pollution (electromagnetic radiation) may be the comparative rarity of visionary experience in the modern world, and the predominence of a removed, overanalytical, repelling 'onlooker' intelligence in its place, resembling that of the (Martin) Amis hero (who will not see because he cannot feel). If this is so, such an intelligence has produced conditions favoring its evolution and survival.”
“The Romantic movement among other things was concerned to bring back into permitted human experience occasions when the 'invisible but real world' was of paramount importance, when the non-visual or dark senses were operating as organs of knowledge.”
“The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.”
“Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.”
“In fact, unconscious scanning goes on all the time. It seems more than ever that what we know as the visionary or poetic mode is our response via the unconscious senses to what is really there in the environment. We are not trying to 'explain it away': it is rather that we symbolize this kind of awareness.”
“His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.”
“Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.”