The Wakeful World Quotes

“The way we see the world is not actually the world in itself. What we see is our idea of it. The truth is, we have no notion of what the world is other than through the veils of our perception.”
― Emma Restall Orr, The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature

“To the animist, a state of permanent enlightenment is not considered natural. His senses inform him that, firstly, life is sustained by a balance of light and darkness, and, secondly, it is lived for the most part in neither darkness nor light, but in varying degrees of twilight and shadow, of half knowing, believing, assuming and concluding”
― Emma Restall Orr, The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature

“As the incorporation of every moment of its experience, every influence of its contextual heritage and environment, a soul is the presence of its complete past.”
― Emma Restall Orr, The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature

“The British philosopher and novelist Raymond Tallis, writing in the New Scientist (January 2010), commented on how the ‘material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically’.”
― Emma Restall Orr, The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature

“Not a squalid den of demons and indecency at the back of a beautiful great house, the mind is a vast and ancient wood, the density of its canopy allowing sunlight only now and then to reach through and touch the spiders and mushrooms in the leaf mould of the forest floor. This is who we are.”
― Emma Restall Orr, The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature