# quotes

**Published by:** [yperion](https://paragraph.com/@yperion/)
**Published on:** 2022-02-19
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@yperion/quotes

## Content

Mar 4, 2016, 8:07:10 PM [bad trip] If you started in the wrong way, everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. The schizophrenic sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts. Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. _Huxley Modern religion in the West is a set of social patterns, or a set of anxieties centered on a particular moral structure and view of obligation. Modern religion is rarely an experience of setting aside the ego. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism. The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born. archaic partnership values: Children are raised by an extended family of cousins and siblings, aunts and uncles, and former and current sexual partners of their parents. In such a milieu, a child has many different relationships and a variety of role models. Group values are not usually at odds with that of the individual or his or her mate and children. Adolescent sexual experimentation is expected and encouraged. Couples may bond for any number of reasons related to themselves and the welfare of the group; such bonding may be-but is not necessarily-lifelong. Sexuality is rarely taboo in such societies, only becoming so as a result of contact with dominator values. Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is allowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy? The strongest argument for the legalization of any drug is that society has been able to survive the legalization of alcohol. A drug is something that causes unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior. You don't examine obsessive behavior; you just do it. You let nothing get in the way of your gratification. This is the kind of life that we are being sold at every level. To watch, to consume, and to watch and consume yet more. What is most feared by those who advocate the unworkable Luddite solution of "Just say no" is a world in which all traditional community values have dissolved in the face of an endless search for self-gratification on the part of drug-obsessed individuals and pop- ulations. We should not dismiss this only too real possibility. But what must be rejected is the notion that this admittedly disturbing future can be avoided by witch hunts, the suppression of research, and the hysterical spreading of disinformation and lies. [Science] prefers to direct its attention elsewhere, with the comment that subjective experiences, however peculiar, are not its province. What a pity, since subjective experience is all that any of us ever has. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. _McKenna power over others: In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be. _Jean Baker Miller In quantum theory, experience is the essential reality, and matter is viewed as a representation of the primary reality, which is experience. _Stapp The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. _Erwin Schrödinger The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. _Grams search engine Religions are false means for satisfying genuine needs. _Karlheinz Deschner Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication between non-equals is warped and distorted by second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating communication jam and a Game Without End. _Robert Anton Wilson Es gibt, o mein Freund, nur ein Wissen, das ist überall, das ist Atman, das ist in mir und in dir und in jedem Wesen. Und so beginne ich zu glauben dies Wissen hat keinen ärgeren Feind als das Wissenwollen, als das Lernen. Die Menschen von unserer Art können vielleicht nicht lieben. Die Kindermenschen können es; das ist ihr Geheimnis. _Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) why psychedelic drugs? No matter how far you have traveled from the place of your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring consciousness and its changes. Why not do so directly? But consciousness is different [to brain/body]. It appears to have no form at all, because anything that would give it form must arise within the field of consciousness. Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known. It is that which is aware of feelings such as joy, regret, amusement, and despair. It can seem to take their shape for a time, but it is possible to recognize that it never quite does. In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life. _Sam Harris But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind wholly with joy, and is itself unmingled with any sadness, wherefore it is greatly to be desired and sought for with all our strength. _Spinoza To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need for our civilisation; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. _Bertrand Russell Der Mensch allein lacht, weil er so tief leidet, dass er das Lachen erfinden musste. _Nietzsche Philosophy is written in this grand book—the universe I say—that is wide open in front of our eyes. But the book cannot be understood unless we first learn to understand the language, and know the characters, in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics. _Galileo Galilei The properties of living things are in some way attached to a material basis, perhaps in some special degree to nuclear chromatin; and yet it is inconceivable that particles of chromatin or of any other substance, however complex, can possess those powers which must be assigned to our factors or gens [sic]. The supposition that particles of chromatin, indistinguishable from each other and indeed almost homogeneous under any known test, can by their material nature confer all the properties of life surpasses the range of even the most convinced materialism. _William Bateson, 1916 Explanation is an illusion, a mirage, a construct, a soothing lullaby. Explanation has no existence. Let’s call it by its proper name, a coward’s defense against the white-knuckled, knee-knocking terror of the precariousness, indifference and capriciousness of sheer existence. _Yalom: "Creatures of a day" I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. _Marcus Aurelius The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life because that is the only reality, all else being the play of thought. But we could just as well call it our greatest folly because that which exists only a moment and vanishes as a dream can never be worth a serious effort We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices. Atthe end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go though it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete nonexistence _Schopenhauer Mar 27, 2016, 5:08:29 PM zitate2 „Die meisten Menschen wollen nicht eher schwimmen, als bis sie es können.“ Ist das nicht witzig? Natürlich wollen sie nicht schwimmen! Sie sind ja für den Boden geboren, nicht fürs Wasser. Und natürlich wollen sie nicht denken; sie sind ja fürs Leben geschaffen, nicht fürs Denken! Ja, und wer denkt, wer das Denken zur Hauptsache macht, der kann es darin zwar weit bringen, aber er hat doch eben den Boden mit dem Wasser vertauscht, und einmal wird er ersaufen.« _Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf We can even imagine an especially consistent neuroethicist surveying the airport scene I have described and viewing it with a certain satisfaction: maybe an environment that is sufficiently stimulating will divert us from indulging in reason-giving, that quaint activity by which man clings to the idea that he is somehow special. Der Erwachsene, der gelernt hat, einen Teil seiner Gefühle in Gedanken zu verwandeln, vermißt diese Gedanken beim Kinde, und meint nun, auch die Erlebnisse seien nicht da. _Demian I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. _zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance When someone tells you they've just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they're locked into jobs they hate; that they're broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they're fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. I take advantage of her disappearance to remove my travelrumpled jacket and to pour a glass of water, allowing the water in the tap to run for fifteen seconds to displace the stale water in the pipes. _Douglas Coupland (Gen X) Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. bzw Man muss den Dingen die eigene, stille ungestörte Entwicklung lassen, die tief von innen kommt und durch nichts gedrängt oder beschleunigt werden kann, alles ist austragen – und dann gebären... / Reifen wie der Baum, der seine Säfte nicht drängt und getrost in den Stürmen des Frühlings steht, ohne Angst, dass dahinter kein Sommer kommen könnte. / Er kommt doch! / Aber er kommt nur zu den Geduldigen, die da sind, als ob die Ewigkeit vor ihnen läge, so sorglos, still und weit... / Man muss Geduld haben / Mit dem Ungelösten im Herzen, und versuchen, die Fragen selber lieb zu haben, wie verschlossene Stuben, und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. / Es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Wenn man die Fragen lebt, lebt man vielleicht allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fremden Tages in die Antworten hinein. _Rainer Maria Rilke The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of the judgment, character, and will. _William James As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value. pardon my wizard talk / but i'm elevated _Kid Cudi The ironist is the vampire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so has fanned him cool, lulled him to sleep, and tormented him with troubled dreams _Kierkegaard Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable. _"The Prophet" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) p.17-18. It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. "For a fifteen-year-old who doesn't even shave yet, you're sure carrying a lot of baggage around." Oshima takes a sip of his coffee and carefully places the cup back on its saucer. "I'm not saying that's wrong. Just that everything has a critical point." "When I was fifteen," Miss Saeki says with a smile, "all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time." _Kafka on the Shore Across the lobby, extremely sick children hooked to machines and tubes were being wheeled out into the sunlight. _All Families are Psychotic, Coupland My aunt once told me that nothing is gained by clinging to life save more life to cling to. The world I find is embarked on a grand adventure. I find I choose to play. He could only marvel at the boy’s mastery of the world—that same world which tossed MacMurrough, upped sided and downed him, and over which he had no more influence than the choosing of the socks he wore while it tossed. _At Swim Two Boys 2017 …all our instincts drive us constantly to create boundaries, not to tear them down. We draw them around our gardens in the form of fences, and within our houses in the form of walls separating our rooms…Boundaries are shelters, and for that reason they must be close to us, and narrow. To tear them from human societies would be like tearing away the shell from the body of a tortoise or the shore from the ocean. But boundaries are not barriers. What we want to keep from the harbor is the storm, not the sea…It is the barriers, then, which are detrimental to human development, not the protecting boundaries whose function is to keep things within healthy limits. _Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations 2018 As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does. _Voltaire As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. _R. L. Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355. I’ve experienced extreme neglect, and was convinced that it was love. I’ve been bullied, abandoned, humiliated, and rejected. Those that should have protected me, didn’t. Those that wanted to, couldn’t. De-personalisation is real. I never formed an ego of my choice; mine was imposed. ‘Loser, idiot, disabled, defective, freak.’ Those were the words of my ‘ego’. I hated it. I knew it was wrong. More were given, but I don't share too much on the internet, yet I share everything. I accepted what was given; I tried to work with it. If that was my part. After-all, those around me wouldn’t lie to me, would they? It must be me who was wrong. But I never truly made it mine. I always had a small part of ‘me’ tucked away. Casting off the titles was the most wonderful experience of my life. I tried to pick up new ones. I tried to pick which ego I would adopt. I could not. They all felt wrong. Like masks, not the real ‘me,’ the silent observer. The observer who used the imposed titles as a tool, to be safe behind rejection, to watch, to learn. I am now told I am a mystery, an enigma. Those with masks are baffled. I do not hide myself in any way. I accept the pain that comes of it. It can never hurt the way that my old mask did. I laugh at insults, at attempts to hurt. They attack the ‘mask’, unable to destroy the source. They do not realize, the mask they see, is the mask that they themselves have projected on me. I own every part of me, good and bad. The only weapon they have is the truth. The problem is, that is my weapon too. Who can withstand the truth more? Those that wear a mask, or those that do not? I am zero. I am nothing. 1 + 0 = 1 44145838 + 0 = 44145838 Like a mirror, I reflect what those bring to me. They only see in me what they wish to see. I am zero. I am alone. I am nothing, and I am everything. For someone to truly know me; I need to find another zero. I do not expect to. But I cannot live another way. I truly love everyone I see, because 1 + 0 = 1. I see myself in everyone, and see everyone in myself. All are lovable. All are beautiful in their way. It’s a good thing I am zero. I was always lazy with math. 1 + 0 = 1. (0) P.S. Funny thing: I picked my signature almost at random. Odd how apropos it turned out to be, like most things in life. The world is quite wondrous. _u/theshadowscall on sls reddit One week before the date set for the wedding, little Remedios woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair of twins crossed in her stomach. _one hundred years of solitude your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality,” said Harry. “If you’re equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and not pretense. While you imagined yourself a child, Mr. Potter, you were a child. Yet there are other existences you could support, larger existences, if you wished. Why are you so free, and so great in your circumference, when other children your age are small and constrained? Why can you imagine and become selves more adult than a mere child of a playwright should be able to compose? That I do not know, and I must not say what I guess. But what you have, Mr. Potter, is freedom. _HPMOR No single thing abides, but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow Until we know and name them. By degree They melt, and are no more the things we know. _Lucretius Everything else can satisfy only one wish; money alone is absolutely good,…because it is the abstract satisfaction of every wish.”2 _Arthur Schopenhauer

## Publication Information

- [yperion](https://paragraph.com/@yperion/): Publication homepage
- [All Posts](https://paragraph.com/@yperion/): More posts from this publication
- [RSS Feed](https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/@yperion): Subscribe to updates