"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, a 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."

Terence McKenna
http://radicalcandor.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/my-favorite-terence-mckenna-quotes

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