ɪˈluːʒ(ə)n/ noun an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience. a deceptive appearance or impression. a false idea or belief. We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, ‘What [...]
həʊks/ noun a humorous or malicious deception verb trick or deceive (someone) When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion Let’s be honest here - we do not live within an accurate portrayal of the ‘real world.’ We assume that [...]
The only solution now is to move constantly or flee definitively. Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear Life for many of us has entered a period of uninterrupted time which gives us the sense of speed and acceleration. Events are already moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up with the news on [...]
‘The attraction of the void is irresistible.’ Jean Baudrillard If you feel like you are unsure of what is real and what is unreal then you are not alone. Our materialistic mode of life is accelerating and expanding so rapidly that it is saturating our modern cultures to the point of abstraction. Life in [...]
Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks Modern man, I dutifully noted, is in search [...]
The real tragedy of our time lies not so much in the unprecedented external events themselves as in the unprecedented ethical destitution and spiritual infirmity which they glaringly reveal. Paul Brunton Our dominant worldview still prefers to believe in the fantasy that we are a living species within a non-living universe, and [...]
‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ John Donne ‘For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.’ Erwin Schrodinger Whether we like to admit it or [...]
Every good story about a search begins with a tale. So, here’s one; it’s a tale about a magician who gave a dinner for his neighbours. There was once a Magician who built a house near a large and prosperous village. One day he invited all the people of the village to dinner. ‘Before we [...]
Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction. —Václav Havel, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994 We are cosmologizing the human. —Henryk Skolimowski, The Participatory Mind Human consciousness has been on a long journey. Our awareness has shifted from the earlier archaic, animistic mode; to the religious and scientific; and then later to an [...]
The spiritual imagination seizes information technology for its own purposes. —Erik Davis, Techgnosis In much of our thinking, the sacred world is divorced from that of secular technologies. And yet the sacred can be equally at home among our technologies since technology, in some form or another, has always been present alongside humanity—from fireplace [...]
Every society has a cognitive structure of permissible knowledge that is managed by an elite and forbidden knowledge that is distributed in black or shadow markets by cognitive outlaws, heretics, revolutionaries, or just plain crazies William Irwin Thompson Our human concepts of truth are always partial, always fragmentary and incomplete, for they are [...]
When we look up into the night sky and see the sparkle of stars, we are awed and enchanted. There is grace, there is wonder, and there is the excitement of the unknown. Everything comes alive with possibility. There is an enchanted world out there, and it beckons to us through a communal mystery. And [...]
