Right Writing Rite

     The brain is a poor reed shaken by every wind, and its fruits are the sport of dust. Solomon has said that the making of many books is a great weariness and that there is nothing new under the sun. There are no new books, and had men the least wisdom, they would read what has been written and use the Nile papyrus for shoes and raiment and not for more arrogant writings. It is of much doubt that the trade of letters has done anything else but whet greed and jealousy and hatred. Thoth has died, and the cicadas scorn the present alphabet men because they say they write for themselves although they are gluttonous to be known as Tantalus in Erebus.
     The sick have written astounding books: The poet Schiller was consumptive, and the odor of rotten apples quickened his soul; Hölderlin was insane; and Christopher Smart spent most of his latter days in Bedlam. Donne and Shakespeare, heretical bawds in their heyday, were broken in their fifties. Donne sat in cerecloth for eight years. These men gave much to other people, and even to the universe, for unless man returns a tithe of what he has taken from nature, he is a skulking grout-head. But no one needs novel miseries, though some cultivate solitude, and most of our books look as though they were ill, lonely, and starved to death. Books should exhale affections, friendship, and good precepts and  be redolent of the mulberry, osiers burning in the hearth, or lentils in the pot. The most pernicious volume is a cold one which is not conceived on Mount Ida but comes from the lawless lust of malignant privacies. Crates, seeing a young man walking by himself, said, "Have a care of lewd company." Men unaccustomed to people are savages and are as odorless as the eunuch....
— Edward Dahlberg, The Sorrows of Priapus, from Part II, The Carnal Myth, pp. 178-179.

     Non-interfering, receptive, Taoistic perception is necessary for the perception of certain kinds of truth. Peak-experiences are states in which striving, interfering, and active controlling diminish, thereby permitting Taoistic perception, thereby diminishing the effect of the perceiver upon the percept. Therefore, truer knowledge (of some things) may be expected and has been reported.
     To summarize, the major changes in the status of the problem of the validity of B-knowledge, or illumination-knowledge, are: (A) shifting it away from the question of the reality of angels, etc., i.e., naturalizing the question; (B) affirming experimentally valid knowledge, the intrinsic  validity of the enlarging of consciousness, i.e., of a wider range of experience; (C) realizing that the knowledge revealed was there all the time, ready to be perceived, if only the perceiver were "up to it," ready for it. This is a change in perspicuity, in the efficiency of the perceiver, in his spectacles, so to speak, not a change in the nature of reality or the invention of a new piece of reality which wasn't there before. The word "psychedelic" (consciousness-expanding) may be used here. Finally, (D) this kind of knowledge can be achieved in other ways; we need not rely solely on peak-experiences or peak-producing drugs for its attainment. There are more sober and laborious — and perhaps, therefore, better in some ways in the long run — avenues to achieving transcendent knowledge (B-knowledge). That is, I think we shall handle the problem better if we stress ontology and epistemology rather than the triggers and the stimuli.
— Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Appendix D, "What is the validity of knowledge gained in peak-experiences?", pp. 80-81.