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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.

-R. D. Laing

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In A World Full

R. D. Laing

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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.

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Whether Life Is Worth Living Depends On Whether There Is Love In Life.

Truth Is Literally That Which Is Without Secrecy, What Discloses Itself Without A Veil.

Society Highly Values Its Normal Man. It Educates Children To Lose Themselves And To Become Absurd, And Thus To Be Normal.

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A Mental Healer May Be A Psychiatrist. A Psychiatrist May Or May Not Be A Mental Healer.

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Live In The Present

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Beauty Is Almost No Longer Possible If It Is Not A Lie.

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.

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We Are All In A Post-hypnotic Trance Induced In Early Infancy.

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In The Context Of Our Present Pervasive Madness That We Call Normality, Sanity, Freedom, All Our Frames Of Reference Are Ambiguous And Equivocal.

No One Acts Or Experiences In A Vacuum.

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Doctors Have Throughout Time Made Fortunes On Killing Their Patients With Their Cures. The Difference In Psychiatry Is That It Is The Death Of The Soul.

Perhaps God Is Not Dead; Perhaps God Himself Is Mad.

If I Hazard A Guess As To The Most Endemic, Prevalent Anxiety Among Human Beings-including Fear Of Death, Abandonment, Loneliness-nothing Is More Prevalent Than The Fear Of One Another.

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?

What Do You Do When You Don't Know What To Do? No Wonder There Are More Suicides Among Psychiatrists Than In Any Other Profession.

Our Civilization Represses Not Only "the Instincts", Not Only Sexuality, But Any Form Of Transcendence. Among One-dimensional Men, It Is Not Surprising That Someone With An Insistent Experience Of Other Dimensions, That He Cannot Entirely Deny Or Forget, Will Run The Risk Either Of Being Destroyed By The Others, Or Of Betraying What He Knows.

True Guilt Is Guilt At The Obligation One Owes To Oneself To Be Oneself. False Guilt Is Guilt Felt At Not Being What Other People Feel One Ought To Be Or Assume That One Is.

The Experience And Behavior That Gets Labeled Schizophrenic Is A Special Strategy That A Person Invents In Order To Live In An Unlivable Situation.

Psychological Breakdowns Are Actually Breakthroughs To Enlightenment.

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' State Is Too Often The Abdication Of Ecstasy, The Betrayal Of Our True Potentialities.

If You Have Passion For What You Do, The Company You Keep, The Life You Live, It Will Be Reflected In Whatever You Create. Passion Is Like That; It Springs Out, Jumps, Unpredictable And Unplanned, Into Everything We Touch. If It Doesn't, Others Know. Passion Can't Be Faked And It Can't Be Manufactured. Which Is Why It Is So Priceless.

Company You Keep

If We Can Revert To The Truth, Then A Great Deal Of One's Suffering Can Be Erased, Because A Great Deal Of One's Suffering Is Based On Sheer Lies.

The Statesmen Of The World Who Boast And Threaten That They Have Doomsday Weapons Are Far More Dangerous, And Far More Estranged From 'reality',than Many Of The People On Whom The Label 'psychotic' Is Affixed

The 'data' (given) Of Research Are Not So Much Given As Taken Out Of A Constantly Elusive Matrix Of Happenings. We Should Speak Of Capta Rather Than Data.

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.

In The Society Of Men The Truth Resides Now Less In What Things Are Than In What They Are Not. Our Social Realities Are So Ugly If Seen In The Light Of Exiled Truth, And Beauty Is No Longer Possible If It Is Not A Lie.

The Square Root Of Nothing.

True Sanity Entails In One Way Or Another The Dissolution Of The Normal Ego, That False Self Competently Adjusted To Our Alienated Social Reality... And Through This Death A Rebirth And The Eventual Re-establishment Of A New Kind Of Ego-functioning, The Ego Now Being The Servant Of The Divine, No Longer Its Betrayer.

A Psychiatrist Who Professes To Be A Healer Of Souls, But Who Keeps People Asleep, Treats Them For Waking Up, And Drugs Them Asleep Again (increasingly Effectively As This Field Of Technology Sharpens Its Weapons), Helps To Drive Them Crazy.

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I Cannot Experience Your Experience. You Cannot Experience My Experience. We Are Both Invisible Men.

We Are All Murderers And Prostitutes - No Matter To What Culture, Society, Class, Nation One Belongs, No Matter How Normal, Moral, Or Mature, One Takes Oneself To Be.

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We Are Effectively Destroying Ourselves By Violence Masquerading As Love.

Destroying Ourselves

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.

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