this is a bird

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"Imagine an infant lying in its cradle and the window is open and into the room comes something marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception... and the child is enthralled.

And then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child 'That's a bird, baby. That's a bird.' Instantly, the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All mystery is gone.

The child learns 'this is a bird, this is a bird'. And by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words."
-- Terence McKenna