“Culture replaces authentic feeling with words.
As an example of this, imagine an infant
lying in its cradle, and the window is open,
and into the room comes something,
marvelous, mysterious, glittering,
shedding light of many colors,
movement, sound, a transformative hierophany
of integrated perception…
and the child is enthralled
and then the mother comes into the room
and she says to the child,
“that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,“ instantly the complex wave
of the angel peacock iridescent
transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word.
All mystery is gone, the child learns,
“this is a bird, this is a bird”,
and by the time we’re five or six years old
all the mystery of reality has been
carefully tiled over with words… This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky,
and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic
shell of disempowered perception…”
