liberation is not revolution. It is not going out of one's way to disturb the social order by casting doubt upon the conventional ideas by which people hold together. [...] To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other people's anxiety requires considerable tact.

Under any civilized conditions it is, of course, impossible for anyone to act without laying plans, or to refuse absolutely to participate in an economy of waste and violence, [...]. It is, however, possible to see that this competitive "rat race" need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless "nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds

In a culture where sex is calculated, religion decorous, dancing polite, music refined or sentimental, and yielding to pain shameful, many people have never experienced full spontaneity. Little or nothing is known of its integrating, cathartic and purifying consequences, let alone of the fact that it may not only be creatively controlled, but also become a constant way of life.

[W]hen our love for others is based simply on mutual need it becomes strangling - a kind of vampirism in which we say, all too expressively, 'I love you so much I could eat you!' It is from such desiring that parental devotion becomes smother-love and marriage holy deadlock.

[W]e have never [...] permitted ourselves to be everything that we are, to see that fundamentally all the gains and losses, rights and wrongs of our lives are as natural and 'perfect' as the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.

An organic natural order has its proper correspondence in a mode of consciousness which is a total feeling or experiencing. Where feeling is broken up into the feeler and the feeling, the knower and the known, what lies in between the two is not relationship but mere juxtaposition.

[T]he soul or personality lives just to the degree that it does not withdraw, that it does not shrink from the full implications of of being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience. For although this seems to suggest the absorption of man into the flux of nature, the integrity of personality is far better preserved by the faith of self-giving than the shattering anxiety of self-preservation.

[T]he soul or personality lives just to the degree that it does not withdraw, that it does not shrink from the full implications of being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience. For although this seems to suggest the absorption of man into the flux of nature, the integrity of personality is far better preserved by the faith of self-giving than the shattering anxiety of self-preservation.

Suffering and death [...] are therefore problematic for the ego rather than the organism. The organism accepts them through ecstasy, but the ego is rigid and unyielding and finds them problematic because they affront its pride.