"The legs of that chair- how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes- or was it several centuries?- not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them- or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for 'I' was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sese were 'they') being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair."

"There stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair"-- that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on it's own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for."

"Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement-- or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair-- I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance."

-Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

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