portions and percipients

 

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In Tibetan, the word for body is lu, which means ‘something you leave behind’, like baggage. We are only travellers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body.
 

—Sogyal Rinpoche

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All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”  

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. 

It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry

—Milton

Paradise Lost

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