“The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”
― The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
― The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
“The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatuses of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in its essence. The rule of enframing threatens humanity with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”
―
―
“When there were no churches, no creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself”
― The Secret Doctrine
― The Secret Doctrine
“We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.”
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
“Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world—the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities.
As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave risks.
But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous—while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long...”
―
As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already has grave risks.
But since society, without knowing it, is starvingfor the inner, the demands on people to evoke it in a "safe" way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous—while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long...”
―
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