James Curcio Quotes & Sayings

A biologist with a history of tooth decay invents a symbiotic microbe which lives in the human mouth and feeds by cleaning our teeth. It secreted calcium, which is poisonous to it, controlling its growth and preventing it from eating the teeth themselves. So this guy, he wants to spread the thing to the world, but it'd never fly, FDA and human squeamishness and all, so he becomes a party animal. He throws wild partys at the lab, kisses female grad students, where's, babies. He backwashes in sodas left on tables. He bums drags of cigarettes. He grants humanity eternally clean and healthy teeth but dies of a terrible cocktail of STDs. — James Curcio

Afterwards, over drinks, one of the barbarians asked me what I dreamt of. I, of course, was taken aback. They say barbarians don't dream. But I told him ... "I dream of tangible nothing," I said.
"So you mean nothing as something, then?" the barbarian replied over the rim of his gin-and-tonic.
"I mean unity, dissolving into non-self," I said, just to be confusing. — James Curcio

Anyone who is truly crazy, in my book, wouldn't be able to understand the dialectic of crazy and not-crazy. Listen, I've worked for the pharmaceutical companies, they have a vested belief in making you believe that if you have a chemical imbalance you need them to be 'cured' of your current issues and personality. Indefinitely. Imagine diagnosing personality only in terms of its negative aspects. Does this strike you as a strategy designed for health? The only way to deal with a problem is to fucking deal with it. Get inside what positive motivation, what intention, makes you behave in the way you are ... and how you could maybe satisfy that need in a healthier or at least more agreeable manner. America wants quick, easy and painless; being a real person is slow, difficult and very messy. — James Curcio

You still long for freedom, my friend, and that longing is your cage. You do not even realize what you are missing, or what it is that you are longing for, but something in you calls out to be aware. You have become parched in the desert of apathy, and thirst for the Bacchic springs forever out of your reach. And while your highest aspects thirst for freedom, so too your basest roots thrust outwards and strangle the hopes - — James Curcio

It is slow, gradual pressure that is the formula for both genius and earthquakes. Life tells us our secrets in these cracks, the way events conspire with each other in hidden grottos. This movement is at times very subtle, over a long time, like plate tectonics. If you don't have the right eyes, you might miss these patterns altogether. Although our lives do not occur in geological scales of time, it is still the gradual pressure and our minute reactions, our habits, that actually speak of our true natures. Our true will and intent is contained in potential within each of us, though in many it is buried very, very deep. — James Curcio

Everything you think about is a meditation, and you could say that the very form of your consciousness follows what you put your attention to. So Chi is really just focused attention, and it is attention, or awareness, that brings about results of whatever kind, rather than some nebulous energy or vril force. But energy is a good metaphor. — James Curcio

All mystics have had psychotic breakdowns, although not all psychotics are mystics. — James Curcio

While we advance exponentially in technological capability, our spiritual or 'biological technology,' our maturity as a species, is still two or three thousand years in the past. This is because many of us live according to ideas that were original and groundbreaking ... in 500 B.C. Most people are unwilling or unable to ask the hard questions- as in, why do we do things the way we do, and what will the end results be? (p.120) Generation Hex — James Curcio