Leonard Shlain Quotes
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Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.
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The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: "I am the Lord thy God there is no other." The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.
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Edited by mostly unknown scholars in A.D. 367, compiled from documents written 30 to 110 years after the Christ event by no one who was present at the events, and composed for the most part by unknown authors in the Greek language that Jesus never spoke, it is held up as the only true record of the Christ story.
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I suggest that a culture adopting an alphabet would denigrate right hemispheric values because the alphabet is a left hemispheric mode of reception. And this right hemispheric denigration would manifest in two principal ways: Women's rights would be taken away, and images would be declared abominations.
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While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.
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When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book's content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn't matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?
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When the time comes to change a paradigm--to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another--the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.
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Images are so prevalent that we get most of our information from them. We receive multiple layers of meaning within a very short compact picture, and that is what the right brain does best. Indeed, as our culture becomes more image-based, we're balancing our hemispheres. Through this new re-wiring, we're becoming a much gentler and kinder society.
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Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.
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We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time.
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It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.
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Democrtitus, in the fifth century B.C. had declared that all the world was composed of only two elements: atomes and the void. This reduction of the myriad of forms to only two was the ultimate in dualistic reasoning. Christianity adopted dualism when it created the strict division between good and evil and heaven and hell.
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Admixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks.....time meandered back and forth between reality and myth.
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Revolutionary art anticipates visionary physics. When the vision of the revolutionary artist, rooted in the Dionysian right hemisphere, combines with precognition, art will prophesy the future conception of reality.
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I... had my mind blown by all the opportunities that were in California in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, everything was Freud... Out here, everything was Jung.
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I'm a synthesizer. We need to synthesize more the relationships between artists and scientists, and men and women.
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Surgeons are not technicians; they're not mechanics. They're artists. I see patterns where not many other people see patterns. ...I think that's what made me a good surgeon, and now, that's what's making me a good writer.