Reality (3) The Movie

 Ken Kesey / Tom Wolfe

                                           "A person as all sorts of lags built into him .   One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your sense receive something and you are able to react .   ONE THIRTYETH 1/30 of a second is the time it takes, if you're the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that .   We are, all of us, doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives---we are always acting on what has just finished happening .   It happened at least 1/30 of a second ago .   We think we are in the present but we're not .   The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means .   That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough .

                  "There are all sorts of lags that go along with it .   There are historical and social lags, where people are living by what their ancestors or somebody else perceived, and they may be 25 or 50 years (or centuries) behind, and nobody can be creative without overcoming those lags first of all .   A person can overcome that much through intellect or theory or study of history and so forth and get pretty much into the present that way but he's still going to be up against one of the worst lags of all, the psychological .   Your emotions remain behind because of training, education, the way you were brought up, blocks, hang-ups, and stuff likethat, and as a result your mind wants to go one way and your emotions don't."