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"There comes a point," Whorf concludes in his landmark essay, "where extension in detail ceases to be knowable and is lost in the vast distance, and where the subjective, creeping behind the scenes as it were, merges into the objective, so that at this inconceivable distance from the observer -from all observers- there is an all-encircling end and beginning of things where it might be said that existence itself swallows up the objective and the subjective."

"To the primal mind truth is not inclusive but essential. In folk literature the "truth" is made up of what lies at the bottom of various events of a perpetual now, while to the Western mind the "truth" is everything that makes up a chronological succession of events."

"It is this temporal revelation which lies at the farthest alcome of the Indian visionary's mind; it is this immediacy which proclaims the preciousness of the instant, the ever-changing, ever modulating Indian moment that is a perpetual Now."

"The primal mind knows space experientially. This affective relationship with space of the primal person, however, does not limit his experience to pragmatic spatial actions, for he sees space as the sacred theatre of his life and the ritual umbilical cord that forever connects him to his divine parent, the Earth."

"In its most fundamental form this spontaneous link between sentience and movement is called dance -a direct, nonverbal, unreasoned assertion of ideas and sentience expressed in forms of motion."

"All forms under creation, "Epes Brown writes, "were understood to be mysteriously interrelated. Everything was as a relative to every other being or 'thing'. Thus, nothing existed in isolation. The intricately interrelated threads of the spider's web [were thought] to depict the world. The same reference occurs in Native American art.

This is a profound 'symbol', when it is understood. The people obviously observed that the threads of the web were drawn out from within the spider's very being. They also recognized that the threads in concentric circles were sticky whereas the threads leading to the center were smooth!"

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