Erik

“In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life; there must be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from a hitherto undreamed-of angle of observation.”
― D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

“You can lower yourselves to the level of the beast, but you can also be reborn as a divine creature by the free will of your spirit. Man can become what he likes - subhuman or superhuman, as he wishes.”
― Pico Della Mirandola

“When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.”
― Peter Coyote, The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

“Know thyself, for in thyself is to be found all that there is to be known,” is still the rule for the wise student. If each one of us would scientifically regard ourselves as centres of force, holding the matter of our bodies within our radius of control, and thus working through and in them, we should have a hypothesis whereby the entire cosmic scheme could be interpreted.”
― Alice A. Bailey, The Consciousness of the Atom