28 Quotes by Stephen Harrod Buhner

In other words, what you believe – that is, the descriptions of the world around you that you received in childhood – act much like software; they program what is perceivable by your conscious mind.

Neuroimaging in the brain shows that once the areas of the brain that process incoming sensory data are sensitized to incoming data, that is, once the gating channels are opened more widely, the sections of the brain that gate that particular type of sensory data stay open. The baseline gating level increases even if the degree of sensory stimulus is not increased. The metaphysical background of the world begins to emerge into sensing on a regular basis.

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the door keeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to. ROBERT BLY.

Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.

To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds. GOETHE.

What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.

We have lost, as James Hillman once put it, the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.

One finding is important for understanding the nature of our sexuality as men. That is that male infants, in the womb, have regular erections – so do male infants after birth. Our sexuality is as much a part of us as breathing, our need for food, our need for love.

When we use a measuring tape, we are using a system of numbers that is human invented. What are the birds using? And further, how are they storing it in memory? To be stored in memory the measurements have to be encoded in some form and that form has to have an internal consistency to it. In other words it has to possess the same kind of structural integrity as our system of mathematical measurement.