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Our Capacity To Think, Except In The Service Of What We Are Dangerously Deluded In Supposing Is Our Self-interest And In Conformity With Common Sense, Is Pitifully Limited: Our Capacity Even To See, Hear, Touch, Taste And Smell Is So Shrouded In Veils Of Mystification That An Intensive Discipline Of Unlearning Is Necessary For Anyone Before One Can Begin To Experience The World Afresh, With Innocence, Truth And Love.

-R. D. Laing

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Our Capacity To Think,

R. D. Laing

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Our Capacity To Think, Except In The Service Of What We Are Dangerously Deluded In Supposing Is Our Self-interest And In Conformity With Common Sense, Is Pitifully Limited: Our Capacity Even To See, Hear, Touch, Taste And Smell Is So Shrouded In Veils Of Mystification That An Intensive Discipline Of Unlearning Is Necessary For Anyone Before One Can Begin To Experience The World Afresh, With Innocence, Truth And Love.

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Schizophrenia Is The Name For A Condition That Most Psychiatrists Ascribe To Patients They Call Schizophrenic.

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In The Society Of Men The Truth Resides Now Less In What Things Are Than In What They Are Not.

We All Live Under The Constant Threat Of Our Own Annihilation. Only By The Most Outrageous Violation Of Ourselves Have We Achieved Our Capacity To Live In Relative Adjustment To A Civilization Apparently Driven To Its Own Destruction.

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.

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.

What We Take Anything To Be Profoundly Affects How We Go About Describing It, And How We Describe Something Profoundly Affects How We Go About Explaining, Accounting For, Or Understanding What Is What We Are, In A Sense, Defining, By Our Description.

A Man Who Says That Men Are Machines May Be A Great Scientist. A Man Who Says He Is A Machine Is 'depersonalized' In Psychiatric Jargon.

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

The Schizophrenic May Indeed Be Mad. He Is Mad. He Is Not Ill. I Have Been Told By People Who Have Been Through The Mad Experience How What Was Then Revealed To Them Was Veritable Manna From Heaven. The Person's Whole Life May Be Changed, But It Is Difficult Not To Doubt The Validity Of Such Vision. Also, Not Everyone Comes Back To Us Again.

In Our Society Many Of The Old Rituals Have Lost Much Of Their Power. New Ones Have Not Arisen.

From The Alienated Starting Point Of Our Pseudo-sanity, Everything Is Equivocal. Our Sanity Is Not "true" Sanity. Their Madness Is Not "true" Madness. The Madness Of Our Patients Is An Artifact Of The Destruction Wreaked On Them By Us, And By Them On Themselves.

No One Acts Or Experiences In A Vacuum.

Life Is A Sexually Transmitted Disease And The Mortality Rate Is One Hundred Percent.

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

The Way Out Is Through The Door You Came In.

The Individual In The Ordinary Circumstances Of Living May Feel More Unreal Than Real; In A Literal Sense, More Dead Than Alive; Precariously Differentiated From The Rest Of The World, So That His Identity And Autonomy Are Always In Question.... He May Not Possess An Over-riding Sense Of Personal Consistency Or Cohesiveness. He May Feel More Insubstantial Than Substantial, And Unable To Assume That The Stuff He Is Made Of Is Genuine, Good, Valuable. And He May Feel His Self As Partially Divorced From His Body.

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.

We Are Bemused And Crazed Creatures, Strangers To Our True Selves, To One Another, And To The Spiritual And Material World - Mad, Even, From An Ideal Standpoint We Can Glimpse But Not Adopt.

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.

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.

I, For Instance, Regard Any Particular Man As Finite, As One Who Has Had A Beginning And Who Will Have An End. He Has Been Born, And He Is Going To Die. In The Meantime, He Has A Body That Roots Him To This Time And This Place.

Man As Seen As An Organism Or Man As Seen As A Person Discloses Different Aspects Of The Human Reality To The Investigator. Both Are Quite Possible Methodologically But One Must Be Alert To The Possible Occasion For Confusion. (...) Seen As An Organism, Man Cannot Be Anything Else But A Complex Of Things, Of Its, And The Processes That Ultimately Comprise An Organism Are It-processes.

Schizophrenia Cannot Be Understood Without Understanding Despair.

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

We Must Remember That We Are Living In An Age In Which The Ground Is Shifting And The Foundations Are Shaking. I Cannot Answer For Other Times And Places. Perhaps It Has Always Been So. We Know It Is True Today.

Experience Is Mad When It Steps Beyond The Horizons Of Our Common, That Is, Our Communal Sense.

Do Not Adjust Your Mind, The Fault Is In Reality.

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.

Perfection Is Something We Should All Strive For. It's A Duty And A Joy To Perfect One's Nature... The Most Difficult Thing Is Love. A Loveless, Driving Person That Just Competes In The Rat Race Is Far From Perfection In My Book.

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 Are Not Satisfied With Faith, In The Sense Of An Implausible Hypothesis Irrationally Held: We Demand To Experience The "evidence".

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

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.

Madness Need Not Be All Breakdown. It May Also Be Break-through.

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 Their Game, Of Not Seeing I See The Game.

The Dynamics And Structures Found In Those Groups Called Families In Our Society May Not Be Evident In Those Groups Called Families In Other Places And Times.

The Brotherhood Of Man Is Evoked By Particular Men According To Their Circumstances. But It Seldom Extends To All Men. In The Name Of Our Freedom And Our Brotherhood We Are Prepared To Blow Up The Other Half Of Mankind And To Be Blown Up In Our Turn.

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

If I Do Not Know That I Do Not Know, I Think I Know. If I Do Not Know That I Know, I Think I Do Not Know.

Psychological Breakdowns Are Actually Breakthroughs To Enlightenment.

There Is No Such Condition As 'schizophrenia,' But The Label Is A Social Fact And The Social Fact A Political Event.

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