Laing, Ronald. The Voice of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

Our minds move between complexity and simplicity, multiplicity and unity. This movement is often felt in terms of going out and forward and in and back. Backwards and forward in time may be called regression and progression, and the movements between the one and the many may be called recession and procession. (p. 156)

A discontinuity in self-progression may occasion confusion and bewilderment. One cannot build a house on a shaky pile of cards. It all collapses back to the discontinuity. In some state a confused clash of confused abstractions, categories, type levels, classes, keeps on disordering complexity into perplexity. One may fall back into a complete shambles of perplexity, without finding rest, peace, stillness in zero. (p. 160)

To confuse modalities is tantamount to psychosis. Such people seem to slip across modalities more easily than others. Some fail to distinguish them as one is supposed to. Others find them so fused and blended in their own experience that they cannot understand the usual distinctions, whereby we try to keep reality apart from itself and us from ‘it’. The sense of being in contact with it comes to be an additional sense upon which our reality comes to seem to depend. This sense may completely evaporate if we revert far enough: back to where the injunctions which generate our non-compossible world are generated.

The irresolvable is not resolved, but dissolved. The absolution lasts only so long as one keeps out of the state of mind in which the irresolvable must arise.

(p. 161)

Our most self-validating premises are the most ingrained. Our hardest programmes are the most self-validating. Our way of looking is not easily disturbed by what it sees, let alone what it cannot see. (p. 161)

The obvious is hard to notice. It is just those distinctions we make and are not able not to make, which are reveale as made, by the fact that some people do not make them, either because they are not able to make them or because they are able not to make them. There are many distinctions some make and many do not (whether we can or cannot), and others which we are not able not to make, if we are making any distinctions at all. (p. 161)