Extraordinary Knowing Quotes

“No matter how useful we might find integrating whatever we’ve learned from seeing one way with whatever we’ve learned from seeing the other, we simply cannot organize our perceptual field so that we can see both ways simultaneously. The relevance of this insight is this: The perceptions that characterize potentially anomalous experience appear to emerge from a state of mind that is, in the moment of perception, radically incompatible with the state of mind in which perceptions characterizing rational thought are possible. The mode of perception . . . depends on access to a state of mind in which ordinary linear thought is momentarily impossible, literally suspended.”
― Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind

“They got me reading people like physicist David Bohm with new and passionate interest. He helped me because he turned the essential question upside down. I'd been asking, since everything in the world looks so separate, how can the connections that would seem to be required by this evidence be possible? On the other hand, Bohm was asking, since everything in the world is interconnected, how come everything looks so separate?”
― Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind