A Quote by John Flavel

We are not distinguished from brutes by our senses, but by our understanding. — © John Flavel
We are not distinguished from brutes by our senses, but by our understanding.
Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.
In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion.
Our problem is that sound is not important in our culture. We know the world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding.
All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.
Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?
We tend to block off many of our senses when we're staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.
We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.
Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.
As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses.
Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from.
The greatest of all our human concepts is the immortality of the personality and the eternal glory of the human soul. Throughout eternity you will be yourself and I will be myself, with quickened senses amplified powers of perception, and vastly increased capacity for reason, understanding, love, and happiness, all of which are qualities we may develop now. Our machines wear out, our barns fall down, and our substance goes back to the dust, but our finest collection of personal qualities will have eternal life.
Our senses, our appetite, and our passions are our lawful and faithful guides in things that relate solely to this life.
Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.
That is why we need to travel. If we don't offer ourself to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.
Design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand.
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