Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred perc

ent.
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential
liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoid
ed is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out
of one s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its norma
l man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to
be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal me
n in the last fifty years.
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 invisibl
e in one way or another.
What we call normal is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, intr
ojection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically es
tranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless
it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schiz
oid, schizophrenic, hysterical mechanisms. There are forms of alienation that are
relatively strange to statistically normal forms of alienation. The normally alienat
ed person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, i
s taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prev
ailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the formal majority as ba
d or mad.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And becau
se we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change
; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
we are all murderers and prostitutes
no matter to what culture, society, class, n
ation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to
be.
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.
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoid
able.
Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love
us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up,
or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a dream is going c
razy.

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfec
t one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person t
hat just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most o
utrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relati
ve adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I
see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play thei
r game, of not seeing I see the game
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 an
d full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I
breathe again.
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and
to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to
others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any par
ticular person is not a necessary part of our being.
Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betraya
l of our true potentialities.
Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not
need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We ar
e not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrational
ly held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a
veil.
There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is
not one of the best reasons.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does
not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is
preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.
(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly
expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever
failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self
is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the
self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is
thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it
commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation
- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to
subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and
free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and
freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it
becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom
can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness
in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated

by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to

be kept apart.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out
of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is 100%