Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.
This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal.
In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.
Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
There’s no point in believing in things that exist.
How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?
If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?
Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?
No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.
For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality.
I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.
And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.
Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.
Everyone in your life is a figment of your imagination--ev en you.
And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?
We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
Was there only one world after all which spent its time dreaming of others?
We are now able to create virtual realities on computers. Are we all living in one created by someone in the future?
In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.
We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.
Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad--or have I?
Whenever I watch 'The Matrix,' I think that it is possible, but I don't think that it's going to be machines enslaving humans.
At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.
For me, it's just a normal artistic endeavour to explore the dark side. Certainly, I'm not alone in it. Artists generally don't like to accept the version of reality that society and culture hand them. They want to know what's really going on. So you're always looking in the ceilings, under the floorboards and behind the walls, trying to find the mechanisms, the structures, and the truth. I find that often leads you into some dark places.
