Luke Rhinehart Quotes

I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn't seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.

You're all murdering life ... You're all trying to change yourselves, all trying to change what is, and thus you're never actually living what is. You're killing who you are every day of your lives by not being who you are ... where you are.

I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name.

As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless.

When I was a young man, barely 18, I discovered Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, and for six months I told my mother she was damned to hell. That wasn't much fun. I abandoned it.

Tell me the manner in which a patient commits suicide and I'll tell you how he can be cured

You're a classic case of Horney's: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving.

And it's his illusions about what
constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him ... His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed

Dealing dreams and destruction to a pattern plagued world.

Every man's personal proverb about himself is: "Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people." The

Men must attempt to develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self.
Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and
consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways.

Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self - a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.

All belief is the least reliable form of knowing ... Where there is a natural knowing of God, there is not need for belief. The highest form of certainty is something you know so thoroughly and so naturally that it's impossible to put into words.

Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair.

But we must come to realise that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot: Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen.

From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death.

New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a lvel of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.

'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded: they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he lives will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.