42
" After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. "
― Ali Shaw , The Girl With Glass Feet
45
" In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence. "
― Karen Armstrong , The Case for God
55
" With or without 'college' we are able to use our senses by perceiving the world around us, that in turn shapes and creates ones own reality. Perception is reality. My 'reality' is not the same as your 'reality' since we all have a different mental database, life experience, physiology, different characteristics, environments we grew up and people we hang out with, etc. I might fall in love with a certain smell while it triggers bad memories for someone else. Same goes for the other senses while perceiving 'reality'. And how real is this so called 'reality' anyway? Our senses can be quite limited compared to a camera or other living creatures on the planet. There are sounds and colours humans can not detect with their senses. We in fact do not perceive the whole 'picture'. The most important things in life are unseen. My point is that we do not need hierarchic, indoctrinating, and capitalized institution called 'science' to tell us what, when, why, and how to think, experiment, sense, and live our lives. Long before there was any 'science', there was sense first. "