"The most simple things in life are the most difficult things. Just getting through the day well is not easy. The most difficult thing in life, I think, is living. I mean, really living. A lot of the time I'm present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment. And that is the healing factor..." ~ R. D. Laing
Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) was born in Govanhill, Glasgow and gained international fame with The Divided Self (1960), a book that examined the treatment of mental illness, a term he hated.
About knowledge, he said, "If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know."
His revolutionary doctrine of "anti-psychiatry" celebrated all experience as an "enriching experience" and blamed society or a patient's immediate family for a patient's emotional breakdown. In The Politics of Experience (1967), he further blamed society for creating sickness.
"Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world," he said.
"Perhaps men and women were born to love one another, simply and genuinely, rather than to this travesty that we call love. If we can stop destroying ourselves we may stop destroying others."
Partake... and celebrate the present.