Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.

R. D. Laing

Categorized in : Way Self Behavior

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.

smell self thinking

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds. by R. D. Laing

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

mind-body body mind

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things a... by R. D. Laing

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.

modernism men

In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.

light men believe

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. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us. He survived. We must see of we now can survive without using a theory that is in some measure an instrument of defence.

medusa benefits hero

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

usual people art

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

silence white book

One cannot say everything at once. by R. D. Laing

One cannot say everything at once.

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.

body roots men

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.

hopelessness body feelings

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

live-in-the-present may past

Few books today are forgivable. by R. D. Laing

Few books today are forgivable.

today book

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

family spiritual baby

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses... by R. D. Laing

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

secrecy truth-is veils

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".

adequate fiction needs

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.

medusa hero stones

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.

psychological suicide wonder

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.

data research taken

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I k... by R. D. Laing

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.

psychology knows thinking

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.