Robert Pirsig

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"The whole renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth view of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason...I think the present day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go to far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much affraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics....But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result, we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought-occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like-becuase they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."