Quotes by British Authors - Page 523

There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us.
Paul Levy
Indigenous people have been tracking the same 'psychic virus' for many centuries, calling it 'wetiko' in Cree (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan), a term that refers to a biologically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by means of evil acts.
Paul Levy
But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles, 'describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands'.
Raymond Cattell
The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable, multidimensional creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety, and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. The psyche becomes impossible to fully describe because there is nothing, including the process of describing it, that is not 'it' in action.
Paul Levy
Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nation-state, or world-system, and exploits that system, knocking it off balance.
Paul Levy
Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talking about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advance, they are master manipulators.
Paul Levy
All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look. As we teach what we learn, I am in essence talking to myself.
Paul Levy
The ego isn't a bad thing. If we didn't develop a strong ego, a strong sense of self, we wouldn't be able to relate to and engage with the extremely powerful and archetypal forces (both dark and light) of the unconscious. If we don't have a strongly developed sense of self (even though it is not, ultimately speaking, the true self), we will get overwhelmed and taken over by the powers of the unconscious such that we will compulsively act them out.
Paul Levy
Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity's inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate in our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this most important topic before this virulent madness destroys us.
Paul Levy
Trauma is a unique phenomenon all on its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself.
Paul Levy
When the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just within an individual but collectively, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis.
Paul Levy
There is no talking rationally, using logic or facts, with someone under the spell of the psychic epidemic, as their ability to reason and to use discernment has been disabled and distorted in service to the psychic pathogen which they carry.
Paul Levy
We are currently in the midst of the greatest epidemic sickness known to humanity.
Paul Levy
Paradoxically, in descending into the depths of the unconscious in order to deal with the prima materia of the shadow, we are simultaneously on the path of ascending to the truly real, as we become introduced to the higher-dimensional light worlds of spirit.
Paul Levy
One of the most momentous, yet all but invisible, psychological changes in human history has been the intensification of a sense of insecurity and alienation from the world around us that arose when we became no longer able easily to get food in a few hours just by gathering it, or hunting it, but had to organize ourselves in a purposeful fashion simply to survive. This change is undocumented, though occasional clues can be gained about it from the comments of the few still alive who have lived through a version of it, such as old Australian Aboriginals. Its essence is subjection to a pervasive but unacknowledged, indeed unnamed, fear. It is the foundation of civilization.
Mark Elvin
It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.
John Bowlby
These were not people you could disagree with. If you disagreed, you were wrong."Juliet Hopkins, Tavistock Institute, as quoted in Relationships and how They Shape Our Capacity to Love By Robert Karen
Juliet Hopkins
young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persistBowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., and Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother-child separation: A follow-up study. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-249.
John Bowlby
Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering.
Melanie Klein
I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain.
Eric Ambler
Sufis are those who have expunged from their minds the human tendencies of envy and enmity.
Idries Shah
I would much rather have my grotesque products of the imagination compared to your delusional sanity.
Christopher Page
When humility is exercised, people begin to realise that they do not, as it were, exist at all.
Idries Shah
There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.
Idries Shah
Tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about.
Diana Wynne Jones
Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.
Idries Shah
One of the great Sufis said: 'A saint is a saint unless he knows that he is one.
Idries Shah
Laziness is always your fault. It is the sign that a man has persevered in uselessness for too long.
Idries Shah
It is time to climb the mountains of our mind
Tim Macartney-Snape
Remember the proverb: 'A sign is enough for the alert, but a thousand counsels are not enough for the negligent.
Idries Shah
Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: 'Greed is the mother of incapacity'.
Idries Shah
I see dull people as projects ... to be reformed
Ben Elton
As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.
Stephen Grosz
For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.
Stephen Grosz
if... says: 'Do not be greedy, be generous', you may inwardly interpret this in such a manner that you will develop a greed for generosity
Idries Shah
The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated.
Idries Shah
Most of the supposedly Sufi organizations, exercises and “orders” are in fact only of archaeological interest.
Idries Shah
If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.
Adrian Furnham
Psychologists call these fully absorbing experiences flowstates, which were discovered and named by a world-famous psychologistwith the most unpronounceable surname I have ever encountered –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Ilona Boniwell
However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can’t run away from your own feet.
Idries Shah
Ego depletion comes from American psychologist Roy Baumeister, who believes that enduring something stressful exhausts our capacity for willpower to the extent that we give in to our temptations that we would rather avoid.
Bruce Hood
Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows.
Frederic Myers
The lightning said to the oak tree: ‘Stand aside, or take what is coming to you!
Idries Shah
Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political convictions are notoriously inaccessible to argument, and we preserve the traditional beliefs of our childhood in spite of the contradictory facts constantly presented by our experience.
Bernard Hart
None should say: ‘I can trust,’ or ‘I cannot trust’ until he is master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.
Idries Shah
If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.
Samuel Butler
If we can predict, then we have observed enough to know that what we are observing does not just happen randomly; we have noted a pattern of regularities.
Hugh Coolican
Sufism, they say, is that which enables one to understand religion, irrespective of its current outward form.
Idries Shah
The love and war in the previous injunctions are of the nature of sport, where one respects, and learns from the opponent, but never interferes with him, outside the actual game. To seek to dominate or influence another is to seek to deform or destroy him; and he is a necessary part of one's own Universe, that is, of one's self.
Aleister Crowley
A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.
Idries Shah
I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.
Sally Graham
The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.
Idries Shah
The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.
Chloe Thurlow
The tongue is the best masseur of furrowed brows.
Idries Shah
In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.
Idries Shah
Projections' - attempts to blame all and sundry for my own past folly - will be found of no avail, and we must learn to withdraw them. None other is to blame for our body, home or circumstance, our friends and enemies, our job and place in the world. We made it all; let us accept and use and better it.
Christmas Humphreys
Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow.
Christmas Humphreys
You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D. Laing.
R.D. Laing
The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition
Anthony Stevens
Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure!
Jon Ronson