“The people with low level of consciousness look for someone else to affirm their value, but people with higher levels of consciousness, what they seek is someone to point out their defects so they can become better.”

Sat Chit Anand
Context: Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you are not even wanting anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy. Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural. Responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion -- any fiction will do. But they don't talk about love. On the contrary, they are all against love, because love is unable to be controlled by them. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, and there is no question of any fight.

Variant: There’s a real bonding in someone beating the crap out of you. - Rolly
Source: Just Listen

Inspire Yourself

Spacetime Tsunami http://www.deoxy.org/t_sunami.htm, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.
Context: I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

Source: tealswan.com/quotes

Step 6, p. 130
The Heart of Change, (2002)

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.

On the cultural sacrifices made by African Americans in higher classes in “Playwright August Wilson on Writing About Black America” https://billmoyers.com/story/august-wilson-on-writing-about-black-america/ (Bill Moyers, 1988)