Tags / 35 quotes from 10 sources
#ego
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
LSD and ego dissolution
These drugs reliably induce states of altered consciousness, much like dreams or religious ecstasy. Daniel X. Freedman, a pioneer of psychedelic research on LSD, wrote that LSD enables “portentousness” of the mind, so that it can perceive more than it can tell, experience more…
Bicycle Day and the origin of the trip
Soon after he ingested the drug, his entire world began to transform—the colors, the forms—and he felt his ego begin to dissolve. Hofmann grew afraid he had taken too much, and asked his assistant to help him home by bicycle. While trying to bike home, Hofmann pedaled and…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Guarda la terra dalla luna
“Non sono imbarazzato” ha detto Umberto, si è toccato il colletto della camicia. “Lo sei” ha detto Durante. “Ti secca aver fatto una brutta figura, ma la tua brutta figura è irrilevante.” “Rispetto a cosa?” ha detto Umberto, incerto su come reagire. “Rispetto alla giornata di…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Troppo occupati ad aver ragione
A volte non si è in grado di riconoscere la propria aggressività perchè si è troppo occupati ad aver ragione. Lama Gangchen
Lo specchio rotto: ritrovarsi negli altri
Chi sono? Indagare dentro per conoscere l’essere? Ritornare in se stessi per riscoprirsi? Pensare e quindi essere sicuri di esistere? Navigare all’interno per trovare la sorgente dello spirito? Ricercare il dolore purificatore? Mortificare la materia? O non sono altro, che…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Scrivere come alibi per l'autoesclusione
Lui pensa che potrebbe restare all’asciutto a parlare con il cartolibraio e con la ragazza dagli zigomi larghi a puro scopo dimostrativo, per confermare a se stesso e agli altri di essere interessante agli occhi di qualcuno, non avere certo bisogno di mendicare attenzione…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Il buddhismo come scienza del mentale
Il buddhismo è una scienza del mentale di antica derivazione, sorta in India intorno al VI secolo a.C. grazie alla predicazione di Gautama Siddhartha, il Buddha storico. Assunse aspetti cultuali già in India, per poi diffondersi in una vasta area dell’Asia; tra l’altro, in Cina…
Vincere l'egoismo a partire dal cibo
L’esercizio della sincerità inizia dalla famiglia, per poi estendersi agli altri gruppi sociali sino al capo di Stato e ai suoi ministri. Certe posizioni sono condivise dai politici giapponesi di stampo confuciano. Un difetto capitale è l’egoismo. Il samurai dovrà debellarlo a…
Chi prega gli dèi solo nel bisogno
Pur rappresentando gli interessi dei samurai e dei nobili, Yoshimasa risulta credibile nello scagliarsi contro gli opportunisti, «i quali pregano il Buddha o gli dèi solo in difficoltà». Certe attitudini erano diffuse nella religione giapponese, spesso basata sul tornaconto e…
Realizzare il Sé dimenticandolo
Ecco un altro spunto che il buddhismo giapponese farà proprio: studiare la Via del Buddha significa studiare il Sé. Il Sé è la base della rilettura nipponica del buddhismo: non se ne può fare a meno. Ciò non rinvia al soggettivo, bensì a una componente transpersonale…
Restare Buddha è più difficile che diventarlo
Voleva mostrare la superfluità delle prescrizioni buddhiste ai fini della liberazione. Con amara ironia affermava che una volta i grandi spiriti si trovavano nei monasteri, mentre ora ne prendevano le distanze. A suo avviso, i laici erano da preferire al clero. La pedofilia…
Distruggi l'io e servi gli altri
Per avere successo il giovane giapponese impara presto che dovrà essere flessibile, gradevole, di modeste pretese. Solo così si amalgamerà nella società, riscuotendo l’approvazione altrui, che, sola, gli dà un senso. Lo esprime il detto tradizionale, tuttora valido: messhi hoko…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Self-worth that fluctuates with status
If I’m in the presence of someone of greater net worth or fame or status, I feel inferior. If I’m in the presence of someone of lesser net worth or fame or status, I feel superior. My sense of self-worth constantly fluctuates. I don’t have any sense of constancy or anchorage or…
Self-centeredness stagnates like the Dead Sea
SELF-CENTEREDNESS. Perhaps the most common center today is the self. The most obvious form is selfishness, which violates the values of most people. But if we look closely at many of the popular approaches to growth and self-fulfillment, we often find self-centering at their…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Grof's transpersonal realm
the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal…
Ego loss in the bath
Ego loss crept upon me without my even noticing. Several times, half-submerged amid mounds of foam sparkling like a Christmas tree, I realized I had completely forgotten who I was. Once I had to get a glass of water from the kitchen and wandered, dripping wet, through the…
Revolution needs psychotherapy at its heart
Whatever the truth, one of the ideas I kept coming back to was that any future revolutionary movement, however you conceived it, must have some kind of psychotherapy at its heart: some basic analysis of the ego. This struck me as being just as important, if not far more so…
The perinatal crisis of ego death
For Grof insisted there was no way of stably accessing the transpersonal without living through the full implications of the perinatal—implications that climaxed in a convulsive death/rebirth crisis. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure how much I was up for this. I double-checked by…
Blacking out in the bath
Finally, I washed them down with a wineglass of water and repacked the rest in the foil. I had barely stashed it away when the trip started to come on. I had never known a trip to kick in so fast or with such violence. I could just about ride the first surges, but then a huge…
Ego death and the risk of psychosis
The next morning I still felt dislocated and physically in shock. What had happened? I’d had experiences of overload before, brief episodes from trips I couldn’t recollect . . . but never total blackout for hours on end. Were the official warnings I dismissed with such…
Grof's dual unity
THE NEXT MORNING I opened my copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious, laughing aloud at myself as I did so. Really, this is getting to be too much, I thought, thumbing through the pages . . . but there it was! Dual unity, Grof calls such moments, and they figure largely among…
Tuning in to one station loud and clear
For me personally, my experience of turning in to the passerby on the street initiated a cycle of boundary-loss experiences, marking a qualitative break with everything that had come before. My earlier trips seemed like fumbling with a radio dial and getting bursts of this or…
Ecstasy and the world made of love
It’s a long time ago now, but the runaway success of the first warehouse parties in the 1980s had seemed to promise a fresh cultural and political breakthrough. Since those days Ecstasy has been so commercialized that it’s hard to recapture the excitement that greeted its first…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
All winners need losers, all saints need sinners
Saints have always declared themselves as abject sinners—through recognition that their aspiration to be saintly is motivated by the worst of all sins, spiritual pride, the desire to admire oneself as a supreme success in the art of love and unselfishness. And beneath this lies…
The individual as a focal point of the universe
At one extreme, then, we have the sacred individual—the unique personal ego, separate from both nature and God—defined as such by a society which, almost in the same breath, commands him to be free and commands him to conform. At the other extreme is the coolie, the cog in the…
Don't try to get rid of the ego-sensation
Remember, above all, that an experience of this kind cannot be forced or made to happen by any act of your fictitious “will,” except insofar as repeated efforts to be one-up on the universe may eventually reveal their futility. Don’t try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take…
The ego as an onion with no kernel
You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense … around nothing. You can’t even want to get…
The separate ego is a fiction
the more it becomes clear that to be is to quarrel and to pursue self-interest, the more you are compelled to recognize your need for enemies to support you. In the same way, the more resolutely you plumb the question “Who or what am I?”—the more unavoidable is the realization…
Removing the illusion of oneself as a separate ego does not mean being “unselfish”
But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of “unselfishness,” which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such “unselfishness” is apt to be a highly…
Self is other and here is there
Yet in this moment when one seems about to become a really total zombie, the whole thing blows up. For there is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught. There is, indeed, no compulsion unless there is also freedom…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Anattā, the Buddhist no-self
Like any other old and geographically dispersed belief system, Buddhism ceased to be a singular system of thought many centuries ago. It is therefore impossible to say what the Buddhist conception of the self is. Nevertheless, the central concept of anattā– traditionally…
Ego-less experience is not more veridical
Similarly, if we are to see ourselves as we really are, we will always see a self there. Ego-less experience is not somehow more veridical than ego experience.
The solidity of self is the illusion
The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. The Ego Trick is not to persuade us that we exist when we do not, but to make us believe we are more substantial and enduring than we really are. There may be an illusion as to what we really are, but not that we…
Husserl: the ego constitutes itself in a history
Husserl wrote: ‘The ego constitutes himself for himself in, so to speak, the unity of a history,’ and ‘Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego properties, he constitutes himself also as a “fixed and abiding” personal Ego.’
Villa Metaphora (Andrea De Carlo)
Un bisogno disperato di ammirazione
Il suo bisogno di sostegno ammirazione affetto lealtà è diventato improvvisamente disperato: deve riceverne subito, non può rimandare neanche di qualche minuto. Lucia alza le spalle, lo guarda a breve distanza, incerta se continuare a fare l’offesa o godersi la rivincita. “Lo…