Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.
Interpretation
The perception of objects relies on the mind's interpretation; without consciousness, they lack inherent existence.
This quote by Jack Kerouac suggests that physical objects, like an orange, only hold significance through our sensory experiences and mental processes. It posits that without our awareness and cognition, objects do not have inherent properties or existence, implying a deep connection between perception and reality. The essence of the orange is not merely in its physical attributes but in how our minds interpret and engage with it, pointing to the philosophical concept of emptiness and the subjective nature of reality.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality in a philosophy class.
Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.
Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
Balk the enemy's power; force him to reveal himself.
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
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