Alec Perkey

“What seems like a reaction to some present circumstance is, in fact, a reliving of past emotional experience. This subtle but pervasive process in the body, brain, and nervous system has been called implicit memory, as compared to the explicit memory apparatus that recalls events, facts, and circumstances. According to the psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter, implicit memory is active “when people are influenced by past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.… If we are unaware that something is influencing our behavior, there is little we can do to understand or counteract it. The subtle, virtually undetectable nature of implicit memory is one reason it can have powerful effects on our mental lives.”12 Whenever a person “overreacts”—that is, reacts in a way that seems inappropriately exaggerated to the situation at hand—we can be sure that implicit memory is at work. The reaction is not to the irritant in the present but to some buried hurt in the past. Many of us look back puzzled on some emotional explosion and ask ourselves, “What the heck was that about?” It was about implicit memory; we just didn’t realize it at the time.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas
I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul,
knowing about you.
...
If the archangel came now, the perilous one,
from the back of the stars but one step lower and
toward us,
our own high beating heart would slay us. Who are you?
You early successes, spoiled darlings of creation...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“we need to break the habit of overreacting because of our speedy assumption and judgments”
― Richard Carlson

“Carl Jung, in a letter to the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Watson, remarked that the Latin for “alcohol” is spiritus, which is also the word for “soul,” and that the abuse of alcohol was fueled by a desire to know God, to transcend daily drudgery for a glimpse of a greater reality.”
― Peter Bebergal, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood