Kathi > Kathi's Quotes

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."

(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)”
― Albert Einstein

“Thought is a force, even as electricity or gravitation. The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.

The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.”
― Peter A. Levine

“After Maharshi Patanjali, Maharshi Swatwaram wrote ‘Hatapradipika’ (meaning - One Which Illuminates the Path of Hatha Yoga , i.e. the physical aspect of Yoga) in the 13th Century A.D.”
― Advait, Pranayama: The Vedic Science of Breath: 14 Ultimate Breathing Techniques to Calm Your Mind, Relieve Stress and Heal Your Body

“The impurities/toxins created at the cellular level are in two forms, liquid and volatile.”
― Advait, Pranayama: The Vedic Science of Breath: 14 Ultimate Breathing Techniques to Calm Your Mind, Relieve Stress and Heal Your Body

“The liquid toxins are put out by our skin in form of sweat.”
― Advait, Pranayama: The Vedic Science of Breath: 14 Ultimate Breathing Techniques to Calm Your Mind, Relieve Stress and Heal Your Body

“The volatile toxins (which are most harmful) are thrown out in form of toxic gases using our lungs, when we BREATHE OUT!!!”
― Advait, Pranayama: The Vedic Science of Breath: 14 Ultimate Breathing Techniques to Calm Your Mind, Relieve Stress and Heal Your Body

“Pranayama plays a pivotal role here in ridding our bodies of these harmful toxins.”
― Advait, Pranayama: The Vedic Science of Breath: 14 Ultimate Breathing Techniques to Calm Your Mind, Relieve Stress and Heal Your Body

“Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner

“Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Fasting Path: For Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical Healing and Renewal

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“Combining evolution, the neuroscience of emotion, some of the best of Jung, some of Freud, much of the great works of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Eliade, Neumann, Piaget, Frye and Frankl, Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand. The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called virtue, telling everyone how tolerant, open and compassionate you are, and wait for likes to accumulate. (Leave aside that telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion. Virtue signalling is not virtue. Virtue signalling is, quite possibly, our commonest vice.)”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Because these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you, superior to you—and that you can’t always be sure you will reach.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“I have learned to pay attention to dreams, not least because of my training as a clinical psychologist. Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Perhaps, if we lived properly, we would be able to tolerate the weight of our own self-consciousness. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we could withstand the knowledge of our own fragility and mortality, without the sense of aggrieved victimhood that produces, first, resentment, then envy, and then the desire for vengeance and destruction. Perhaps, if we lived properly, we wouldn’t have to turn to totalitarian certainty to shield ourselves from the knowledge of our own insufficiency and ignorance.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning