Bhaskar Shukla

“I don’t know if you’re going to understand this, Greyson, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You should never be afraid to cry.” “But boys—” I started to say. “No, not just because it’s okay for boys to cry too. But because, Greyson, you are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It’s not a weakness, Grey. It’s what I love about you most.” Then he hugged me. Hard. And I’m not sure, but he might have been crying. That short, unsullied time when I simply thought he was special has a sense of place and a smell all its own. It is a tiny shred of my father that, like a child’s blanket, I am both attached to and embarrassed by. And that I would be devastated to lose. I suppose that irretrievable time is as much a piece of me as it is of him.”
― Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

“But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fast moving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive, when the body-state veers toward the painful band. In this perspective, feelings are the sensors for the match or lack thereof between nature and circumstance. And by nature I mean both the nature we inherited as a pack of genetically engineered adaptations, and the nature we have acquired in individual development, through interactions with our social environment, mindfully and willfully as well as not. Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. They serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Many cultures regard hallucination, like dreams, as a special, privileged state of consciousness—one that is actively sought through spiritual practices, meditation, drugs, or solitude. But in modern Western culture, hallucinations are more often considered to portend madness or something dire happening to the brain—even though the vast majority of hallucinations have no such dark implications.”
― Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

“Because the scientific understanding of manic-depressive illness is so ultimately beholden to the field of molecular biology, it is a world in which I have spent an increasing amount of time. It is an exotic world, one developed around an odd assortment of plants and animals—maize, fruit flies, yeast, worms, mice, humans, puffer fish—and it contains a somewhat strange, rapidly evolving, and occasionally quite poetic language system filled with marvelous terms like “orphan clones,” “plasmids,” and “high-density cosmids”; “triple helices,” “untethered DNA,” and “kamikaze reagents”; “chromosome walking,” “gene hunters,” and “gene mappers.” It is a field clearly in pursuit of the most fundamental of understandings, a search for the biological equivalent of quarks and leptons.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind