“Korzybski argued that language must be viewed as a map, which is useful only insofar as it is similar to the world it describes. He stressed the importance of questioning the unconscious assumptions built into our language, and urged a response to life on the basis of fresh, "first order" experience rather than the old experiences that have been crystallized in words and concepts.”

“Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience.”

“The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.”

“Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

“The spirit of life relates to what has been described by the word “heaven”; the phenomenal world around us to what is described by the word “earth.” Heaven and earth are one. Only man, in his foolishness, endeavors to separate them. To the extent that he is successful in this it becomes hell in his own experience. Hell is simply the absence of the experience of heaven; it is the absence of the experience of life, in whatever degree. The experience of life as it really is, is heaven.”

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into whichhe has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records ofother people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness isthe only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts fordata, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is theuniverse of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.”