Quote by Bernardo Kastrup

“When we had unsettling dreams as children, our parents would try to reassure us with that fatidic statement: ‘Forget about it, it was just a dream!’ That was a seminal moment in the process of our entrancement. It was then and there that we began to learn that an experience is either bigger than ourselves - the ‘real world out there’ - or so insignificant that it should be dismissed without a thought. It was then and there that we began to slice away huge chunks of our mental lives and throw them in the garbage bin, while elevating other chunks - the ones that weren’t just dreams - to the status of oppressive external tyrants... It inculcates the notion that each and every experience is to be categorized as either nothing or other; that each and every experience must either be killed or exiled. By doing this, we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves… Whether we reject or project the reality of an experience, we isolate ourselves from it. We avoid responsibility for it. Perhaps most importantly, we circumvent the need to identify with it. But in doing all this we become, at best, small and insignificant ourselves: What is left for us to be? Ironically, thus, our neurotic attempt at self-preservation is precisely what causes the existential despair from which we succumb.”

Quote by Bernardo Kastrup