2 Quotes by Terrance Keenan

There is a word that comes to us from the Middle Low German thatmeans to be tongue-tied. Not so much that one cannot think what to saybut that the experience is so beyond words and the conditions defined bywords and their reasoned order that the tongue is tied by expressingsilence. It is mumchance. It is the experience one has confrontingsomething beyond meaning.

The novelist Masao Abe has said, “In our daily life, there are momentswhen we are here with ourselves—moments in which we feel a vaguesense of unity. But at other moments we find ourselves there—looking atourselves from the outside. We fluctuate between here and there frommoment to moment: homeless, without a place to settle.” He goes on toadd that only humans experience this divisive self-consciousness, thatplants and other animals just are what they are.