It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

The defects of the mind are
like the wounds of the body. Whatever care we take to heal them the scars ever remain, and there is always danger of their reopening.

Pity the theory which sets itself in opposition to the mind! It cannot repair this contradiction by any humility, and the humbler it is so much the sooner will ridicule and contempt drive it from real life.

The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

Indeed, sometimes it’s easier to recover from a physical crisis than from a myth crisis. It can be difficult to heal from a myth crisis if you don’t even realize you’re in one! An unacknowledged myth crisis can be the seed of lifelong depression and even a terminal illness.

There's a paradox in every paradigm.

Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be coloured by the glasses of pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind, and that, for all its ailments, it shares in the whole of the psychic life of man. The psychotherapist must even be able to admit that the ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has lost its connection with mankind as well as with the spirit.

The profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind.

People around the world are confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds.

Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.

The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.