I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.