Quotes about Neurosis

The forbidden truth is that we are living by a set of lies which are necessary for short-term profit, at the expense of human physical and psychological life and global environmental integrity. We are living in a system where power ensures that the requirements of profit take priority over the requirements of living things-including the need to know that this is the case. Consequently our freedom extends as far as, and no further than, the satisfaction of these requirements, with all else being declared neurosis, paranoia, communism, extremism, the work of the devil, or Neptunian nonsense.

"Don't look for perfection in me. I want to acknowledge my own imperfection, I want to understand that that is part of the endlessness of my growth.  It’s absolutely useless at this stage in your life, with all of the shit piled up in your closet, to walk around and try to kid yourself about your perfection. Out of the raw material you break down you grow and absorb the energy.  You work yourself from inside out, tearing out, destroying, and finding a sense of nothingness.  That nothingness allows God to come in.  But this somethingness— ego and prejudices and limitations— is your raw material.  If you process and refine it all, you can open consciously.  Otherwise, you will never come to anything that represents yourself...The only thing that can create a oneness inside you is the ability to see more of yourself as you work everyday to open deeper and say, fine,  ‘I’m short tempered,’ or ‘Fine, I’m aggressive,’ or, ‘Fine, I love to make money,’ or, ‘I have no feeling for anybody else.’ Once you recognize you’re all of these things, you’ll finally be able to take a breath and allow these things to open."

Repression of sexuality leads to hysterical (hystera means womb in Greek), exaggerated pseudospirituality, typical of Victorianism and Freud's days. But repression of the religious myth leads to the neurosis of our time, to a primitive mythologization of secular values, to a pseudoreligion of material prosperity, monetary greed and sexual thrills. Finally, the repressed energy of the myth contains also the threat of collective no less than individual psychosis, which those who can become aware of the situation have the awesome responsibility to attempt to transform.