I hate and renounce as a coward every being who is unwilling to consecrate his whole life to the control as well as to the reorganization of the buried, unfounded, and uncreated life of his thought. . . . I hate and renounce as a coward every being who separates what he calls his body from what he calls his consciousness or his thought. . . . I hate and renounce as a coward every being who will not consent to go through two hundred thousand reincarnations on earth until he finally becomes conscious of having been born.

Antonin Artaud

Among all the ideas that pass through our head there are those we accept and those we do not accept. On the day when our self and our consciousness are formed there is established within this incessant movement of incubation a distinctive rhythm and a natural choice whereby only our own ideas remain in the field of consciousness, and the rest automatically vanish. It may take us time to carve out our emotions and isolate from them our own face, but the way we think on the most important points is like the totem of an indisputable grammar that measures its terms word for word. And our self, when we question it, always responds in the same way, like someone who knows that it is he who answers and not another. It is not like this with the Indian.

A European would never allow himself to think that something he has felt and perceived in his body, an emotion which has shaken him, a strange idea which he has just had and which has inspired him with its beauty, was not his own, and that someone else has felt and experienced all this in his own body or else he would believe himself mad and people would probably say he had become a lunatic.

Antonin Artaud, The Peyote Dance