Tao Te Ching
R. D. Laing
1927 – 1989 CE
Shaman, “acid Marxist,” counter-culture high priest, “Elvis of the psyche,” British counterpart to Timothy Leary, friend of Chögyam Trungpa, and psychiatrist to Sean Connery, the Beatles, Jim Morrison, and many other famous 1960’s icons; R. D. Laing was also a serious scholar who challenged orthodox psychology denouncing electro shock, chemical therapy, and the dehumanizing incarceration of the mentally ill. He developed Bateson’s double-bind theory, promoted safe haven centers, and the community-care model that has become today’s norm. Inspired by the Mahasiddha tradition of transmutation and growing the positive in perceived negative, he inspired techniques exemplified by the time he treated a patient with catatonic immobility by helping her get a job as an artist’s model.
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British Poets Scientists Shamanistic
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Quotes by R. D. Laing (17 quotes)
“Some people are born mad, some achieve madness and some have it thrust upon them”
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“I'm not an object to be changed, I'm a person to be accepted”
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“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
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“The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.”
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“words, words, words—at best evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares n the sky of darkness”
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“The group, whether We or You or Them… has no consciousness of its own. Yet we may shed our own blood and the blood of others for this bloodless presence.”
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“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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“Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other… and haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self… is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.”
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“Society highly values its normal man… Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
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“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
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“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience… The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane.”
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“The family’s function is to repress… to deny death by avoiding life… to promote respect, conformity, obedience; to con children out of play; to induce a fear of failure; to promote a respect for work; to promote a respect for ‘respectability.’”
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“If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succor out of nothing.”
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“When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.”
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“A social norm may come to impose an oppressive obligation on everyone, although few people feel it as their own... Everyone will be carrying out orders—always from elsewhere... This human scene is a scene of mirages, demonic psuedo-realities, because everyone believes everyone else believes them. How can we find our way back to ourselves again?”
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“Disagreement shakes us out of our slumbers and forces us to see our own point of view through contrast with another person who does not share it”
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“The unforgivable sin is to not become all that you can as a human being”
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