Mind Parasites Quotes & Sayings

The suggested idea or group of ideas," said M. Charcot, very justly, " find themselves in their isolation sheltered against the control of that great collection of personal ideas, a long time accumulated and organised, which constitute consciousness properly so called, the Ego." ' " With certain subjects it is possible to call forth, by means of suggestion or intimation, a coherent group of associated ideas which install themsehes in the mind in tlie fashion of a parasite, remain isolated from all the rest, and may be explained outwardly by corresponding motor phenomena." " We ask permission to preserve this striking metaphor: Suggestions, with their automatic and independent development, are real parasites in thought. — Anonymous

Full of the usual blights, mistakes, ruinous beetles and parasites, glorious for one week, bedraggled the next, my actual garden is always a mixed bag. As usual, it will fall far short of the imagined perfection. It is a chore. Hard work. I'll by turns aggressively weed and ignore it. The ground I tend sustains me in early summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I'll hoe for the rest of the year. Raised in the mind's eye, nurtured by the faithful composting of orange rinds and tea leaves and ideas, it is finally the wintergarden that produces the true flowering, the saving vision. — Louise Erdrich

There is an intrinsic law: thoughts don't have their own life. They are parasites; they live on your identifying with them. When you say, 'I am angry,' you are pouring life energy into anger, because you are getting identified with anger. But when you say, 'I am watching anger flashing on the screen of the mind within me,' you are not anymore giving any life, any energy to anger. — Rajneesh

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years. — Cyril Connolly

It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for 'genuine' feelings, 'real' emotion, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. — Iain M. Banks

Believe me, when you're dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best. Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared to stray into the corridor. — Alastair Reynolds