You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself."Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought...
In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...
Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and "but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing!" isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's "cell phones are necessary for socialization" fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital.
Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of our mouths, I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.
Why are you here?Where am I?You have come to this place… to lie in the ground?The derision in the question was clear.I have come to this place to find peace.And what is peace?Laughter in the recesses of his mind.This is peace. Perhaps it is. I don’t know.A pause.Talking to yourself, eh?There is no one else around.That is the beginning of wisdom.And what of it?Who are you?I am Peter.What are you?I… I am that which says I.Clever.Sometimes.He sparked a cigarette, nicotine bringing a touch of stability to his otherwise entirely too excited cognitions.What is I?I am.That is all?I don’t know.Where is I?Where am I?I am between this and that.This is again wisdom.He laughed aloud now, pulling deeply on his smoke, exhaling through clenched teeth.I am space.Of a sort.I am a character in a story.Sometimes.Nothing more?A page of your life turns. Do you see it?Sometimes.The blank of the page, the openness of its margins, do you see?Yes.This is the void of your unfolding imagination.Indeed.Would you fill it with your own story?I am void. I am between. I am neither this nor that. I am an idea of a between.What story would you have?Whatever I can. I am nothing.That is enough?No.What would you be?A man.This is also wisdom.