Quotes from laing ronald david iii

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

Freud was a hero. He descended to the "Underworld" and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism -- can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.

Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.