IS ANOTHER WORLD WATCHING?

Here's the first book I finished reading in 2024...

"Hallucination, however common it may be, is less common, far less common, than ignorance. There are in the Universe, any sensible man knows, far more things that I have never seen than things which I have imagined were there and weren't there."

--Gerald Heard, IS ANOTHER WORLD WATCHING?, 1953

"But, though the process has immensely accelerated in our generation, it has been going on for at least twenty-five centuries, to our certain knowledge. This kind of thing has not been sprung on us. Moreover, we have had plenty of time to notice our reaction to this sort of experience. We go through three phases with a monotonous and rather discouraging regularity.


"First, we say 'What rot, what mischievous nonsense! Such a fraud (the reporter of the fact we find detestable because indigestible) should be shut up. It is as dangerous as it is repulsively ridiculous!' Next we begin to joke about it: the thing, we own, has something of the lewdly funny about it, but of course it is really only a joke with which to tease and upset the pompous. Then one day, without anyone noting it, the whole thing has become obvious, banal, boring, a commonplace only noted to show how hopelessly backward, silly and prejudiced our elders were. The process is over for the time being. We have adjusted. But we have learnt nothing, nothing about ourselves. And when the next shock comes, the next breakthrough of unaccepted fact, we react once more in the same way."

--Gerald Heard, IS ANOTHER WORLD WATCHING?, 1953