Cauldron of Alchemy
“What matters is what appears in your soul, not what your eyes see and what you can name”
Zdzisław Beksiński
“The fateful question for the human race seems to be whether, and to what extent, the development of its civilisation will manage to overcome the disturbance of communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction. Perhaps in this context, the present age is worthy of special interest. Human beings have made such strides in controlling the forces of nature that, with the help of these forces, they will have no difficulty exterminating one another, down to the last man. They know this, and it is this knowledge that accounts for much of their present disquiet, unhappiness and anxiety.”
Sigmund Freud
“The tragic bind that man is peculiarly in – the basic paradox of his existence – is that unlike other animals he has an awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand, and on the other, he is the only animal in nature who knows he will die… he is an emergent life that does not seem to have any more meaning than a non-emergent life..and so despair and the death of meaning are carried by man in the basic condition of his humanity.”
Ernest Becker
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because 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.”
R.D. Laing
“For the most part, our 'obvious' preferences and 'natural' ways of looking at things are mere hand-me-downs. They become routine and 'right' because we hold back from even imagining the opposite. Where people lack imagination it is always because they are afraid even to play with the possibility of something different from the matter-of-fact to which they cling to for dear life. The ability to achieve and maintain an interested impartiality between imagined opposites, however absurd one side might seem, is essential for any new creative solution of problems.”
Fritz Perls
“The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction that nourished our ancestors – dreams, vision, ritual and religious experience – are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. Thus in our pride and hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, we have cut ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and from the deepest parts of ourselves.”
Robert Johnson
“If life beyond the bubble is really about coming home to our humanness, the flourishing it promises is unlikely so long as we hold that humans are somehow separate and superior to the rest of life.”
Peter Senge