What's the difference between the ego and the soul? [...] One has the stamina to be invisible, the other one doesn't. [One voice fathoms] [...] channeling that type of grace, of being able to stand next to somebody and hear that voice: 'Find a reason to touch that woman's baby'. [...] You just know that when you are sitting next to that woman in the plane [...] 'That infant has spinal cancer.' [...] You hear [inside] 'Find a reason to touch that child.' You are chattering nonsense with the woman, but then you can grab the child's hand. And she thinks you are playing, but you know grace is flooding in that little infant. You'll never see her again, but you know that child's going to live. [...] You know it. [...] [Myss is moved and sobs.] That is what you have as a possibility in you. But you have to become irrational. You have to become fully and totally mystically irrational. Not emotionally irrational, because that's self serving. You have to become mystically irrational. Mystically irrational means you have to become mystically fearless. You have to be able to do what your mind would give you logical reasons to not do. You have to be everything your soul beckons you to be and everything your mind tells you to be cautious about. You have to become forgiving. You have to become bold in a way that your soul recognizes. The mystical experience is about your capacity to perceive fully in a hologram at the speed of light to get the consequences of an action that your mind will say doesn't matter. But every part of your soul knows: 'This matters. This matters. Everything matters. Everything matters.' The soul measures everything and every piece of life matters to the soul. The mind in its arrogance says: 'Only the people who matter to me matter.' To live through the soul is your highest calling. And to build a soul with stamina you cannot do that on visualisation. It requires prayer. Removed video keynote address by Caroline Myss Myss.com (*1952) US American spiritual teacher, mystic, medical intuitive, bestselling author, Being Fearless, sponsored by the US American non-profit educational retreat center Omega Institute for Holistic Studies Being Fearless conference, New York City, part 3 of 3, minutes 8:40-12:24, 20:43 minutes duration, New York City, New York, 11.-13. April 2008   Source: ► Video interview with Caroline Myss Myss.com (*1952) US American spiritual teacher, mystic, medical intuitive, bestselling author, presented by Conference Call Conversations with the Masters, presented by the US American web broadcasting station https://lifecoachmary.com/Llife Coach Mary, host Mary Allen (*1951) British arts administrator, management consultant, life coach, radio broadcaster, writer, minutes 29:45-38:00, 1:00:46 duration, aired 8. November 2007   Everybody's life is ultimately on the path of enlightenment. [...] You cannot not be. minute 29:45 Every now and again I'll meet someone who will openly say, "I am an atheist." But they are always young and healthy. [...] I never take these people seriously [...] So I'll always say to them, 'Call me when you are old, dying, alone, and poor and we'll see what happens.' And inevitably their eyes rush to God and rush to heaven. [...] What they always mean by atheism is that they had enough of the church which is – let's just face it – understandable.  Minute 29:54   Rotating marguerite It was (St.) Paul of Tarsus who recognized immediately that the story of Jesus could be converted to politics and power right off the bet. He [Jesus] was not even cold in the grave or high in the Heavens before men realized there was power and money in his story. So from the getgo the innocence and beautiful message of this teacher [Jesus] was conta- minated. [...] Taking a human being and turning him into a God [...] that people take literally. [...] All of this taken literally has just wreaked havoc on this planet. [...] Because they inherited Roman mythologies (including sacrificing on altars). Sacrificing something on an altar was Roman. [...]  Minute 31:54   When someone says 'I can't deal with religion' I fully understand that. But [...] beyond religion and all the nonsense of religion [...] there are deeper Divine impulses that even our Founding Fathers recognized. And our nation is founded on these impulses by the way. In the age of Enlightenment people like Hobbes and John Knox, Descartes and Rousseau, they, too, were shedding the constraints of traditional religion and looking further for the deeper impulses [...] that simply were inherent in human nature and in human spirit. [...] They were looking for the universality of the archetypal journey of the human being. [...] The human being searches by nature for meaning and purpose, that by nature searches for truth. That the human being thrives better when his or her life is devoted to meaning and service than the absence of that. That the human being thrives better within a climate of hope than hopelessness. That there must be profound force – shall we call it grace – that comes through hope that is absent in hopelessness.  Minute 33:11   Beyond the politics of God is the experience of God. And that's where the soul comes in. But it takes a very courageous person to make the leap and say 'I need more than my encounter with God to be through rules and regulations, and traditions that say my God is according to these myths and that is how I know the nature of God, but rather it is time to release those myths and go into my interior soul and invoke the experience of God.' My history of this is that people only come near the experience of God and only in very small doses only in a bargaining position when they are in crisis. [...] When they are in the hospital or someone who is very sick. [...] They wait to the last minute and then they pull out prayer.  Minute 35:40

• Kundalini is at the basis of genius, insanity, neurosis, prodigies, and other extraordinary states of mind.
  Gopi Krishna (1903-1984) Indian yogi, mystic, teacher, social reformer, writer, On Mystical Experience, Drugs, And the Evolut-
  ionary Process. An Interview with Gopi Krishna, excerpted from: The Awakening of Kundalini, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1975

• I am beginning to realize that 'sanity' is no longer a value or an end in itself. The 'sanity' of modern man as about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane […] perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally 'sane.' Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Anglo-American Catholic Trappist monk, mystic student of comparative religion, social activist, poet, writer, Raids on the Unspeakable, New Directions, 8th edition 17. January 1966

• Insanity can be a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
  Attributed to R. D. Laing (1927-1989) British Scottish psychiatrist, author, 1972, cited in: Larry Chang, Wisdom for the Soul. Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, S. 412, Gnosophia Publishers, 1st edition 28. April 2006

• The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.
  Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994) Romanian French playwright, Theatre of the Absurd dramatist, Eugene Ionesco; Godfather of Theater of Absurd, 1983 discussion of his work Rhinoceros on his World War II observations, presented by the US American daily newspaper Los Angeles Times, Myrna Oliver, 29. March 1994

• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) German-British statistician, economist, author, essay "Small is Beautiful", presented by the publication "The Radical Humanist", volume 37, issue 5, S. 22, August 1973

Alternative translation: "There was never a genius without a tincture of madness."

• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
  Aristotle (384-322 BC) classical Greek pre-Christian philosopher, physician, scientist, misogynist, attributed by Seneca Moral Essays, "De Tranquillitate Animi" On Tranquility of Mind, section 17, subsection 10; cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote

• Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift.
  Plato (427-347 BC) Ancient Greek pre-Christian philosopher, founder of the occidental philosophy, dialogue Phaedrus, ~370 BC

• Socially shared hallucinations, our collusive madness is what we call sanity. Ronald D. Laing (1927-1989) British Scottish psychiatrist, author, The Politics of the Family and Other Essays, chapter "The Mystification of Experience", 1964, S. 73, Routledge, New York, 2001; cited in: article Madness and Its Enigmatic Origins, presented by the journal Sacred Web, S. Bendeck Sotillos, Academia.edu, PDF, May 2020

• Strange times are those in which we live, forsooth, qhen old and young are taught in falsehood's school, and the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. John Wesley Nichols, collection of speeches by George Francis Train, The People's Candidate for President. George Francis Train, S. 44, 1872; falsely attributed to Plato (427-347 BC)

• Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness, and the combinations of society continually detect it. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) US American philosopher, Unitarian, lecturer, poet, essayist, Journals
  of Ralph Waldo Emerson, entry 14. August 1838, Forgotten Books, 6. November 2016

Sativa Bud

• A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater indepen-
  dence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
  Erich Fromm (1900-1980) US American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, author, The Art of Loving, S. 89, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1956

• When in group narcissism the object is not the individual but the group to which he belongs. […] The assertion that
  "my country" (or nation, or religion) is the most wonderful, the most cultural, the most powerful, the most peace-loving,
  etc. does not sound crazy at all; on the contrary, it sounds like an expression of patriotism, faith and loyalty.
  Erich Fromm (1900-1980) US American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, author, The Heart of Man. Its Genius for Good and Evil, Harper Collins, June 1980, S. 75, Lantern Books, revised edition 1. October 2010

• But where there is no madness, there is, to be sure, also no real, active, living intellect. For wherein is intellect to prove itself but in the conquest, mastery, and ordering of madness? Hence complete lack of madness leads to another extreme, to imbecility (idiocy), which is an absolute absence of all madness. But there are two kinds of the other [type
  of people] in whom there really is madness. The one kind rules madness and shows the highest strength of intellect
  just in this conquest. The other is ruled by madness people who are really mad.
  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) German philosopher, philosophical work Ages of the World, 1811

• The process that creates an image or an imaginative vision is one thing, and the process that tags it, frames it, and puts it into a context is quite another. We all are mad together in the first and visionary process, and Kekulé can dream of the serpent biting its tail, Poincaré can step onto a tram and have a theorem's solution he has slept on flash into his mind […]. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact," as the good Bard of Avon wrote. They who are truly mad are those who have difficulties in providing the appropriate social and cultural context for their visions and voices. It was Joan of Arc's good fortune that her voices and visions came at the time of the Hun-
  dred Years' War when they could be put to good use in rallying the French to repel the English invasion. When the Maid of Orleans' visions were no longer of use to the Church, she was burnt at the stake – as countless heretics before her had been, or after her, like Giordano Bruno at the time of the birth of modern science in 1600.
  William Irwin Thompson (1938-2020) US American cultural historian, social philosopher, cultural critic, mythologist, poet, writer, On
  False Memories and the Art of Writing Fiction, summer 2013

• The objection that [new theories] are not crazy enough […] applies especially to crackpots. Most of the crackpot papers that are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those that are impossible to understand are usually published. When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete, and confusing form. To the discoverer himself it will be only half under-
  stood. To everybody else it will be a mystery. For any speculation that does not at first glance look crazy, there is
  no hope.
  Freeman Dyson, Ph.D. (1923-2020) British-born US American theoretical physicist (quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astro-
  nomy, nuclear engineering), mathematician, author, cited in: Wordpress blogspot The crackpot's conundrum by Alec Nevala-Lee

• It is the space where artists wait, and mystics, also madmen. It is imagination's crevice, the space between two worlds where everything is more than it seems and images unfold.
  D. Stephenson Bond, US American psychoanalyst, lecturer, author, Living Myth. Personal Meaning as a Way of Life, S. 135, Shambhala Publicatons, Boston, Massachusetts, 1993

• The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
  Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) US American longshoreman philosopher, social writer, The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms, section 124, Harper, 1954, 1955

• It is notorious that brilliant people are often the most dense about their own human blind spot, precisely because their intelligence, so clever in other things, conceals it from them; multiply this situation a thousandfold, and you have a brilliant scientific and technological civilization that could run amuck out of its own sheer uprooted cleverness.
  The solution proposed by Greek tragic wisdom through the drama of Aeschylus may not, then, be as frightening as we imagine: in giving the Furies their place, we may come to recognize that they are not such alien presences as we think in our moments of evading them.
  In fact, far from being alien, they are part of ourselves, like all gods and demons. The conspiracy to forget them, or
  to deny that they exist, thus turns out to be only one more contrivance in the vast and organized effort by modern society to flee from the self.
  William Barrett (1913-1992) US American professor of philosophy, critic, Irrational Man. A Study in Existential Philosophy, Doubleday, 1958, 1962, Anchor Books paperback, 1962

• A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror. ⚡ George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1949) Greek Armenian metaphysician, composer, choreograph, spiritual teacher
  of the "Fourth Way", writer, cited in: Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) Russian esotericist, student of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, author, In Search of the Miraculous. Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, Harcourt, 1949

• Whereas people who can no longer bear the absence of human values in the real world are considered "crazy," those who have severed themselves from their human roots are certified "normal." And it is members of the latter group to whom we entrust power and whom we allow to determine our lives and our future. We believe they have the correct
  key to reality and know how best to deal with it. But a person’s "relatedness to reality” is not the only criterion for
  establishing mental illness or health; we also have to ask to what degree feelings such as despair, perceptions such
  as empathy, and experiences such as enthusiasm are still possible. Arno Gruen (1923-2015) German-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst, critic of civilization, author, Hildegarde Hannum, translator, Hunter Hannum, translator, The Insanity of Normality. Realism As Sickness. Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness, Grove/Atlantic, 1st English edition July 1992

• The irrational in the human has something about it all together repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape.
  George Santayana (1863-1952) Spanish US American philosopher, literature critic, poet, essayist, novelist, cited in: BrainyQuote

• Self-deception (repression) cannot logically exist.
  It is extremely pervasive.
  It is a hallmark of the healthy mind.
  It is at the core of the process that generates mental illness.

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. [...] The unreasonable man adapts
  surrounding conditions to himself. [...] All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish politician, pacifist, satirist, dramatist, Nobel laureate in literature, 1925, Maxims for Revolutionists, #124, 1903, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 16. May 2013

• No society or government can behave any higher than its Lunacy Level. The Lunacy Level is the average level of mental illness in any group or country. So since society consists of individuals, the only way to lower the Lunacy Level is for a self-honest individual to stop lying about his spiritual illness and allow Truth to heal him. But there are so few who place Truth above egotism. Vernon Howard (1918-1992) US American spiritual philosopher, author, SOLVED. The Mystery of Life, S. 36, New Life Foundation, 1. December 1995

• Conspiracism is a particular narrative form of scapegoating that frames demonized enemies as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm.
  Chip Berlet publiceye.org (*1949) US American senior analyst at Political Research Associates (PRA), former vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, co-chair of Civil Liberties Committee, activist, specializing in the study of right-wing movements (religious right, white supremacists, homophobic groups, paramilitary organizations), investigative journalist, author, Matthew N. Lyons, US American independent historian focusing on social movements and systems of oppression, author, Right-Wing Populism in America. Too Close for Comfort, The Guilford Press, New York, 1st edition 1. November 2000

• The ones who think they are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones who do. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) Canadian-American poet, novelist, cited in: article
  Here's to the Crazy Ones, presented by the publication wiseabap, 6. April 2016

• A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) French philosopher, critic, poet, essayist, unsourced quote, cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote

• Since the Freudian revolution, and especially since the Second World War, the secret formula has been this:
  • If you want to debase what a person is doing, call his act psychopathological and call him mentally ill;
  • if you want to exalt what a person is doing, call his act psycho-therapeutic and call him a mental healer.

Mount McKinley – Reflection Pond, Denali National Park, Alaska

• Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
  Charles Mackay (1814-1889) Scottish songwriter, poet, journalist, author, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841, Harriman House, Hampshire, United Kingdom, 26. September 2003, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, reprint 22. October 2013

• Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation. Charles Mackay (1814-1889) Scottish songwriter, journalist, poet, author, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841, Harriman House, Hampshire, United Kingdom, 26. September 2003, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, reprint, 22. October 2013

• How does a schizophrenic episode manifest itself? Because of an activation of the unconscious [...] and a collapse of the ego.
  John Weir Perry (1914-1998) US American Jungian psychiatrist, author, John Beebe (*1939) US American Jungian analyst, coauthor, The Far Side of Madness, S. 2, Spring Publications, 1974, 2nd revised editon 30. May 2005

• [Quoting C.G. Jung] "The way 'schizophrenia' unfolds is that, in a situation of personal crisis, all the psyche's energy is sucked back out of the personal conscious area, into what we call the archetypal area. Mythic contents thus emerge from the deepest level of the psyche, in order to re-organise the Self. In so doing, the person feels himself withdrawing from the ordinary surroundings, and becomes quite isolated in this dream state." [End of quote] […]
  Carl Jung believed that "schizophrenia" is a self-healing process – one in which, specifically, the pathological complexes dissolve themselves. The whole schizophrenic turmoil is really a self-organising, healing experience. It's like a molten state. Everything seems to be made of free energy, an inner free play of imagery through which the alienated psyche spontaneously re-organises itself – in such a way that the conscious ego is brought back into communication with the unconscious again.
  The acute hallucinatory phase, during which these contents go through the re-ordering process, usually lasts about six weeks. This, by the way, corresponds to the classical description of visionary experiences in various religious texts, such as the proverbial "forty days in the wilderness" often referred to in the Bible.
  Interview with John Weir Perry (1914-1998) US American Jungian psychiatrist, author, Dr. John Weir PerryA CONVERSATION WITH DR. JOHN WEIR PERRY, PDF, presented originally by Global Vision Corporation, host Michael O’Callaghan, 1982, reproduced in the publication Global Vision, 1992-1995

• Summarizing what schizophrenia is really all about the really prominent features are captured by the terms hyper-reflexivity and alienation. Hyper-reflexivity by that I mean a kind of self-consciousness. I don't just mean the self-consciousness of say an adolescent, but rather the schizophrenic self-consciousness is something much more disruptive of the normal spontaneous flow of experience and behavior. And it can also happen intellectually so that one becomes aware of one's own thinking. […] They can get very engaged in a process of watching their own mind. And they will sometimes almost feel that they can kind of see the cognitive operations going on inside their skull. Or they may just sort of think about thinking and they may begin to analyze themselves too much. It can be extremely alienating and debilitating for the person. […] So a scrutinizing self-consciousness that is not relaxed and able to just accept itself ends up leading to an experience of there being no self. Louis Sass, Ph.D., US American professor of clinical psychology, gra-
  duate school of applied and professional psychology, Rutgers University, expert in severe psychopathology, philosophy and psychology, author, cited in: Soul Searching, part 2 of 3, excerpted from the documentary DVD, broadcasted by the British public-service television broadcaster Channel 4, YouTube film, minute 1:56 and 3:31 and 4:14, 10:24 minutes duration, posted 21. January 2010

• [Schizophrenia as] a condition of obscure origins and no established etiology, pathogenesis and pathology, [without] even any clear disease marker or laboratory test by which it can readily be identified. Louis Sass, Ph.D., US American professor of clinical psychology, graduate school of applied and professional psychology, Rutgers University, expert in severe psycho-
  pathology, philosophy and psychology, author, Madness and Modernism. Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Harvard University Press, 1992, reprint edition September 1994, 15. July 1998

• Certainly, any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth. Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, social critic, proponent of the French Revolution, advocate of civil liberties, freedom of religion, free trade, deist, writer, Questions sur les miracles, 1765, cited in:
  Norman L. Torrey (1894-1980 ) US American translator, author, Les Philosophes. The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy, S. 277-278, Capricorn Books, 5th edition 1960

• [Donald] Trump's so-called madness is all over the place. He is out of control. […] We continue to open to the univited guest, we welcome him in, we don't reject him.
  We have a need to desparately begin to look at the world through principles that are other than rational order like of aperspectival thinking in Gebser's work, like Jung's synchronistic ideas, like acausality [meaningful coincidences]. […]
  Unless that [trickster] Mercurius factor is added to our consciousness, our rational thinking is going to run us into a mess. […] Unless I am Trump in every way he is, but don't act it out, I will not be able to be in contact with the instincts it [the shadow] often has. […] If I don't wrestle with it, I will tend to act it out. […] If I wrestle with those [shadow] impulses they can inform me and help me embody my own nature on deep instinctual levels.
  Audio interview with Nathan Schwartz-Salant, Ph.D. (1940-2020) Swiss-American Jungian psychologist, author, Speaking of Jung – Episode #26: Nathan Schwartz-Salant, podcast episode #26, presented by the podcast platform Speaking of Jung, host Laura London, minutes 52:02, 30:15, 39:28, 54:35 minutes duration, aired 30. June 2017

• Has it ever struck you that when people get persecution mania, they usually have a good deal to feel persecuted about?
  C. P. Snow (1905-1980) English physicist, novelist, consultant of the United Kingdom government, The Affair, chapter 11, 1960

• Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for,
  in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day
  in order to afford to live in it.
  Attributed to Ellen Goodman (*1941) US American journalist, Pulitzer prize recipient for Distinguished Commentary, 1980, cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote

• Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this
  Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshipping. Unknown author, online falsely attributed to Hubert Reeves (*1932) French Canadian astrophysicist, popularizer of science, author, cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote

• The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.
  Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) French general, political leader during the French Revolution, self-crowned emperor
  (1804-1815), Military Maxims of Napoleon, 1988, Alpha Publishing 1. May 2015

• Every madman thinks all other men mad. Latin proverb

• Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome. Chinese proverb