Inner Self Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Inner Self. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
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Allen Ginsberg
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The best fighter is never angry.
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Lao Tzu
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The Voice There is a voice inside of you That whispers all day long, "I feel this is right for me, I know that this is wrong." No teacher, preacher, parent, friend Or wise man can decide What's right for you--just listen to The voice that speaks inside.
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Shel Silverstein
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Peace comes from within.Β  Do not seek it without.
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Gautama Buddha
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When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways--either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.
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Dalai Lama XIV
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Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.
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Maya Angelou
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A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
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George Bernard Shaw
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Never respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it...Don't allow his anger to become your anger.
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Bohdi Sanders (Warrior Wisdom: Ageless Wisdom for the Modern Warrior)
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Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
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We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.
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Dalai Lama XIV
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Everybody in the world is seeking happinessβ€”and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends & Influence People)
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Your inner strength is your outer foundation
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Allan Rufus
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I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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I stop fighting my inner demons. We're on the same side now. T-shirt
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Darynda Jones (Second Grave on the Left (Charley Davidson, #2))
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It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.
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Germany Kent
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The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.
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Hermann Hesse (Demian)
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The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.
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Gabriel GarcΓ­a MΓ‘rquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
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Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Have love for your inner Self and everything else is done for you.
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Amit Ray (Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity)
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You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred creative force of All that is, will be and ever was.
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Anthon St. Maarten (Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny)
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Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.
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Michael A. Singer (The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself)
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How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
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Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
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She remembered who she was and the game changed.
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Lalah Delia
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Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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Things are sometimes faded but they will always become clear, where there seems nothing but bad look closer, you’re sure to find good.
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Sherman Kennon (Whisk Of Dust: Too Unseen Distance)
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Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.
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Golda Meir
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Outer beauty pleases the EYE. Inner beauty captivates the HEART.
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Mandy Hale (The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence)
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When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.
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Lisa Unger (Beautiful Lies (Ridley Jones, #1))
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I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.
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Richelle Mead (Vampire Academy (Vampire Academy, #1))
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I can do this… I can start over. I can save my own life and I’m never going to be alone as long as I have stars to wish on and people to still love.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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Once you embrace your value, talents and strengths, it neutralizes when others think less of you.
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Rob Liano
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Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.
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Petar Dunov
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Some of the most beautiful things worth having in your life come wrapped in a crown of thorns.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Is love just a butterfly? Love can tell us so many things about the deep waters of our inner self and the secrecy in the hidden brushwood of our emotions. ("Alpha and Omega")
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Erik Pevernagie
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Accomplishments don’t erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.
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Shannon L. Alder
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If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.
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T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth)
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In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
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Socrates
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Important is not so much our place in the theater of the world but our acceptance in the theater of our inner self. ("Victory daze" )
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Erik Pevernagie
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Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.
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Amit Ray (Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style)
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If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.
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Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
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In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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I suffer because my interactions with others do not meet the expectations I did not know I had.
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James Patrick McDonald
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Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace.
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Nikki Rowe
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Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.
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Deepak Chopra
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You are your master. Only you have the master keys to open the inner locks.
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Amit Ray (Meditation: Insights and Inspirations)
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Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.
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Jess C. Scott (Clear: A Guide to Treating Acne Naturally)
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Butterflies can't see their wings. They can't see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.
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Naya Rivera
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Everything is within your power, and your power is within you.
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Janice Trachtman (Catching What Life Throws at You: Inspiring True Stories of Healing)
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There is a God part in you. The consciousness. The pure Self. Learn to listen the voice of that Power.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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When we dare to think differently and decide to expand our thinking, we instill fresh energy in our drained mindset. By infusing new life into our neural web, we create inner space in our journey to self-knowledge and deeper insight.( "Lost dreams")
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Erik Pevernagie
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In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes. I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots.
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Beau Taplin
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At the core of your heart, you are perfect and pure. No one and nothing can alter that.
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Amit Ray (Meditation: Insights and Inspirations)
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Consider the fact that maybe…just maybe…beauty and worth aren’t found in a makeup bottle, or a salon-fresh hairstyle, or a fabulous outfit. Maybe our sparkle comes from somewhere deeper inside, somewhere so pure and authentic and REAL, it doesn’t need gloss or polish or glitter to shine.
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Mandy Hale (The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence)
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For so many years, I couldn’t understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like… for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I’ve ever loved is trapped inside of my chest. I’ve breathed all of them in so deeply that I’ve nearly choked and died on every soul that I’ve ever given myself to.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love.
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Amit Ray (Om Chanting and Meditation)
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I feel a resurgence of my 6-year-old self… that little warrior, goddess of a girl reminding me of who I was when I was little, before the world got its hands on me.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he is too lazy or too afraid to go and put the fire out.
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Criss Jami (Killosophy)
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i was lieing to myself when I thought I was lost, I have never been lost - I just wasn't ready to be found.
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Nikki Rowe
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It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.
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James Clavell (Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1))
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I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself β€” my past and the kaleidoscope of mistakes, failures and wrong turns that have stacked unbearable regret upon my shoulders.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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I lay on my floor crying again… shaking. Searching for inner strength and coming up empty. My eyes burned and my mouth was dry as I sucked on air that seemed to keep getting thicker and harder to breathe. I tried to leave again, but ended up leaning my forehead against the door, feeling defeated and wishing the Grim Reaper would come for me in all his silky, black glory.
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Nathan Daniels
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Compassion is all inclusive. Compassion knows no boundaries. Compassion comes with awareness, and awareness breaks all narrow territories.
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Amit Ray (Nonviolence: The Transforming Power)
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When people are just drifting along the tides of life and can’t see the shores of reality anymore, they may experience someday the irresistible desire for a liberating burst, emerging deeply from the inner self and disentangling them from their manufactured pattern. That day might be a day of all possibilities and make them ready to hit the ground running. ("A change of vision" )
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Erik Pevernagie
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In life one has a choice to take one of two paths: to wait for some special day - or to celebrate each special day.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
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Be there for others, but never leave yourself behind.
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Dodinsky (In the Garden of Thoughts: Be Your Best Self (Inspirational Gift Book for Finding Your Inner Strength))
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To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must β€œrecollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
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Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales)
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What is discipline? Discipline means creating an order within you. As you are, you are a chaos.
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Osho (Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega Volume 10)
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I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl β€” this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever in love with you.
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Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
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Maybe it’s NOT Maybelline. Maybe you were just born with it.
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Mandy Hale (The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence)
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A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part
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Nisargadatta Maharaj
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Never being on the shortlist of people’s attention may arouse a sensation of desolation but may, all together, be an expectant challenge to excel and exceed oneself, as it can inflame the will to extract unsuspected power from the inner self, never to give up and to hit the ground and run…ever since life may offer an astounding window of opportunity to assert oneself in a land of contention. ("Not on the shortlist" )
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Erik Pevernagie
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Rituals can be reliable safeguards, but plot twists in the theatre of our life should not freak us out. If we are willing to transform ourselves and confront our inner self with the rites of our inner world, we can allow a dialogue within ourselves. In our existential challenge, faltering can give us a choice between ignoring, accepting, or integrating the plot twists on our path. ("Digging for white gold" )
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Erik Pevernagie
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One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
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Jean Vanier (Community and Growth)
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All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
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Fernando Pessoa
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I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenityβ€”to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.
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Edith Wharton
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The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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If we don’t want life to pass us by, while the world is swiveling around us, let’s look inwards and turn things upside down in the inner chambers of our mind. Only after reshuffling our rooted values we can look outwards, find out the fascinations of life, and rediscover our selves, layer after layer. (β€œFinally unbend Β« )
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Erik Pevernagie
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Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.
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Anthon St. Maarten
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The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning)
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If the glare of the public eye has become unbearable, our inner child may claim its rights and our bodily shadow might turn into our mental second self, become our anchor, make us stay grounded and grant us deepness and intensity. By retreating from the blaze of display into our substantial self, we gain rootedness, insight and new worldly wisdom. ("Not without my shadow")
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Erik Pevernagie
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Patience is the antidote to the restless poison of the Ego. Without it we all become ego-maniacal bulls in china shops, destroying our future happiness as we blindly rush in where angels fear to tread. In these out-of-control moments, we bulldoze through the best possible outcomes for our lives, only to return to the scene of the crime later to cry over spilt milk.
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Anthon St. Maarten (Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny)
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To love is not to possess, To own or imprison, Nor to lose one's self in another. Love is to join and separate, To walk alone and together, To find a laughing freedom That lonely isolation does not permit. It is finally to be able To be who we really are No longer clinging in childish dependency Nor docilely living separate lives in silence, It is to be perfectly one's self And perfectly joined in permanent commitment To another--and to one's inner self. Love only endures when it moves like waves, Receding and returning gently or passionately, Or moving lovingly like the tide In the moon's own predictable harmony, Because finally, despite a child's scars Or an adult's deepest wounds, They are openly free to be Who they really are--and always secretly were, In the very core of their being Where true and lasting love can alone abide.
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James Kavanaugh (The Poetry of James Kavanaugh)
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We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.
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Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha)
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Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
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Nisargadatta Maharaj (I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
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Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.
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Parker J. Palmer (A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life : Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world)
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But don't forget who you really are. And I'm not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. Β  You know who you really are. When you're alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you. Β  Your life is about to be ripped apart. You will be turned into a digging machine. Your muscles will toughen. So will your heart and soul. That's necessary for survival. But don't lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won't really have survived at all.
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Louis Sachar (Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake (Holes, #1.5))
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Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painfulβ€”something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not what love is all about. Loving behaviour doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.
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Susan Forward (Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life)
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Throughout our emotional odyssey in the unembellished narrative of our life, we may sense many alluring voices that are enticing us into a beguiling, seamless story. Our inner monologue, however, might start raising consequential questions about the scintillation of that story, about our vulnerability during the tempting process and the danger of losing our real self. The question may be asked, whether the lure might enlighten, weaken or destroy our living. While our interior monologue mostly listens to the wisdom of our experience and the guidance of our memory, it may happen that it prefers not to listen. In that event, however, unreason and passion will be calling all the shots. ( β€œWoman in progress” )
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Erik Pevernagie
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On Stripping Bark from Myself (for Jane, who said trees die from it) Because women are expected to keep silent about their close escapes I will not keep silent and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will please mark the spot where I fall and know I could not live silent in my own lies hearing their 'how nice she is!' whose adoration of the retouched image I so despise. No. I am finished with living for what my mother believes for what my brother and father defend for what my lover elevates for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes to embrace. I find my own small person a standing self against the world an equality of wills I finally understand. Besides: My struggle was always against an inner darkness: I carry within myself the only known keys to my death – to unlock life, or close it shut forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow and the sun, I am happy to fight all outside murderers as I see I must.
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Alice Walker (Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete)
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You cannot trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. We may say we know this but ours is the culture of the deal-making mind. From infancy, we have breathed in the belief that there is always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. Eventually, we believe, if we do the right thing, if we are good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, work hard enough, we will be rewarded. There are different verses to this song - if you are sorry for your sins and try hard not to sin again, you will go to heaven; if you do your daily practise, clean up your diet, heal your inner child, ferret out all your emotional issue's, focus your intent, come into alignment with the world around you, hone your affirmations, find and listen to the voice of your higher self, you will be rewarded with vibrant health, abundant prosperity, loving relations and inner peace - in other words, heaven! We know that what we do and how we think affects the quality of our lives. Many things are clearly up to us. And many others are not. I can see no evidence that the universe works on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happen to good people - all the time. Monetary success does come to some who do not do what they love, as well as to some who are unwilling or unable to see the harm they do to the planet or others. Illness and misfortune come to some who follow their soul's desire. Many great artist's have been poor. Great teachers have lived in obscurity. My invitation, my challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.
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Oriah Mountain Dreamer (The Invitation)
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He does not want a girl who trifles with Christianity. He wants a woman who is radically given to Christ. He does not want a girl who prays tepid, lukewarm prayers. He wants a woman who lives in defiance of the powers of Hell. He does not want a girl who is self-adorning with the latest fashions and trends. He wants a woman who is adorned with the inner jewelry of Christ-given holiness. He does not want a girl who dishonors and belittles her parents. He wants a woman who honors the authorities God has placed in her life and serves them with charity and gladness. He does not want a girl whose Bible is an accessory to her wardrobe. He wants a woman whose hunger and thirst is to know the Lord, and who diligently feasts upon His Word. He does not want a girl whose tongue is a deceptive weapon of selfishness. He wants a woman whose words drip with the honey of the name of Jesus.
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Leslie Ludy
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A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled. There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come. I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. β€œAt this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. β€œThere is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?” She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, β€œNo, I don't want to accept this.” β€œWho is speaking?” I asked her. β€œYou or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. β€œI am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?” She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, β€œThis is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.” This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment. I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called β€œThe Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing the light of consciousness to it.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
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Terence McKenna