“All mystics have had psychotic breakdowns, although not all psychotics are mystics.”
“While we advance exponentially in technological capability, our spiritual or 'biological technology,' our maturity as a species, is still two or three thousand years in the past. This is because many of us live according to ideas that were original and groundbreaking... in 500 B.C. Most people are unwilling or unable to ask the hard questions- as in, why do we do things the way we do, and what will the end results be?" (p.120) Generation Hex”
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”
“All men are jerks, all women are psychotic.”
“Bobby Edson, like most coaches, was a kind of mystic: he believed the cosmos was endowed with an ineffable muffling system that rendered all the racist, sexist, tasteless and denigrating remarks made by coaches inaudible to the students about whom they bellowed them.”
“There is a saying that 'the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims in.' The health and structural integrity of the ego means the difference between spiritual emergence, the unfolding of a transpersonal identity; and a spiritual emergency a crisis brought on by the same unfolding, during which the foundations of sanity can be shaken.”