But human life is only dust and ashes without love. If you investigate and inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is ac-cumulated and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.

When we start to doubt, hope is the anchor that binds our faith to love. I am speaking in the vocabulary of Christianity. It is a pity that this vocabulary is so degraded. The first English translation of what is now called “the holy ghost” was by John Wycliffe, who translated it as “our healthy spirit.” That is the manifestation of Divinity within and through our own nature.  All our natures, with this healthy spirit are sparks of light in the same fire. That immediately unites us. That companionability in the light of our healthy spirit—which is light and love and the way and truth and life—is what I have become less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years or so.

- R.D. Laing interviewed by Daniel Burston, adapted from DharmaCafe

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