Russ Kick is the editor of the wildly successful three-volume anthology The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals and the bestselling anthologies You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know . His books have sold over half a million copies. The New York Times has dubbed him "an information archaeologist," Details magazine described him as "a Renaissance man," and Utne Reader named him one of its "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He is creator of the popular website www.thememoryhole.com.

CHAPTER 1

REALITY, TRUTH, AND SUCH THINGS

Let's begin at the beginning, the foundation for everything else. Well ... let's try, at least. Before we look at living and loving, creating and crying, sex and death, family and government, let's see if we can get a bead on reality, existence, truth—the substrate from which everything forms. This topic always ungrounds me. My head spins. How do I know anything? How would I know even if I did happen to know something? How am I managing to make the slightest bit of sense out of the chaotic jumble of atoms (or whatever) that (I think) surrounds me? Do I even exist? If you think I'm exaggerating, pollinate your brain with the following barrage of thoughts and observations from chemists, physicists, philosophers, poets, sages, magical realist writers, and other reality hackers. Who needs psychedelics to get to altered states?

The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. —Niels Bohr (paraphrased)

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. —Anaïs Nin

Reality is frequently inaccurate. —Douglas Adams

Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. —R. Buckminster Fuller

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions, and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us. —J. G. Ballard

Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. —René Magritte

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. —Gertrude Stein

A hallucination is a species of reality. —Terence McKenna

Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings. —Albert Hofmann

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite. —William Blake

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible. —Novalis

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. —Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.... They forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. —William James

It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. —Celia Green

In studying the literature connected with my work, I became aware of the great universal significance of visionary experience. It plays a dominant role, not only in mysticism and the history of religion, but also in the creative process in art, literature, and science. More recent investigations have shown that many persons also have visionary experiences in daily life, though most of us fail to recognize their meaning and value. Mystical experiences, like those that marked my childhood, are apparently far from rare. —Albert Hofmann

About half of the U.S. public (49%) says they have had a religious or mystical experience, defined as a "moment of sudden religious insight or awakening." This is similar to a survey conducted in 2006 but much higher than in surveys conducted in 1976 and 1994, and more than twice as high as in a 1962 Gallup survey (22%). In fact, the 2009 Pew Forum survey finds that religious and mystical experiences are more common today among those who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (30%) than they were in the 1960s among the public as a whole (22%). —Pew Research Center (2009)

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached. —Simone Weil

We need to take dreams more literally, and waking life more symbolically. —Robert Moss

Paranoia is having all the facts. ——Edmund White, paraphrasing and summarizing William S. Burroughs

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. —Erich Fromm

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself. —Lewis Mumford

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation. —Marilynne Robinson

Reality is not always probable, or likely. —Jorge Luis Borges

Of course, sometimes it's quite difficult to know if you're hallucinating. You might hallucinate a silver pen on your desk right now and never suspect it's not real—because its presence is plausible. It's easy to spot a hallucination only when it's bizarre. For all we know, we hallucinate all the time. —David Eagleman

Questions confine answers. When there are no longer questions, answers are no longer bound by them. —Lao Tzu (adapted by Ray Grigg)

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. —David Eagleman

A person has all sorts of lags built into him.... One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react.... We are always acting on what just finished happening. It happened at least one-thirtieth of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of what happened in the past. —Tom Wolfe, paraphrasing Ken Kesey

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring. —Ezra Pound

Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination. —Gerard M. Edelman

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. —Barbara Kingsolver

We tend to think of memories...