"Bion perforated the mystique of ontic "objectivity" implicit to logical-positivistic, deterministic science and revealed its own unsuspected mythology--its absolute dependence on sense data. Applying his concept of reversible perspective, he found myths, both collective and personal, to be themselves "scientific deductive systems" in their own right... Bion founded... a numinous discipline based on the abandonment of memory, desire, and understanding... "seeing things as they truly are -- without disguise". He was preoccupied with the question of how we know what we know." --Bion's Transformation in 'O' and the Concept of the "Transcendent Position"

"The group, any group, organisation, society, needs and evolves a structure of tasks, roles, procedures, rules, ascribed status (the 'group culture'), in order to contain the anxiety of the unknown and the responses which, unconsciously, are mobilised to defend against that unknown. The unknown is at the same time what is unknown and feared in each of us and what is unknown in the realities we engage with as we live and work."

"Within the group... one can see operating a number of powerful unconscious and unlearned, quasi-instinctive, strategies of evasion and denial... constituting... "group mentality", opposed to the conscious aims, intentions and efforts of individuals."

Making Absences Present: The Contribution of W. R. Bion to Understanting Unconscious Social Phenomena

"Melanie Klein focused on the content of primitive, psychotic anxieties. She believed that the primitive was never transcended, that we never have a maturational achievement.. She believed that envy and destructiveness loomed [large] in the unconscious... Extremely primitive unconscious phantasies... are bubbling away in the inner world and the simmering of this cauldron is a prerequisite to being able to think at all."

"Before in mathematics, infinity had been a taboo subject. Previously, Gauss had stated that infinity should only be used as "a way of speaking" and not as a mathematical value. Most mathematicians followed his advice and stayed away. However, Georg Cantor would not leave it alone... his new ideas gained him numerous enemies. Many mathematicians just would not accept his groundbreaking ideas that shattered their safe world of mathematics... [Kronecker] did all he could to suppress Cantor's ideas and ruin his life... The rest of [Cantor's] life was spent in and out of mental institutions and his work nearly ceased completely... He died in a mental institution on January 6, 1918... Today, Cantor's work is widely accepted by the mathematical community. His theory on infinite sets reset the foundation of nearly every mathematical field and brought mathematics to its modern form."

"...thoughts are the shadows of our feelings... When we think of those we love or hate.. thought processes are rarely cool and detached - neither should they be... Although we are still rational at such times there is no doubt that our thought processes are not following a machine-like logic... This elusive mental state has been explicitly addressed by Bion with his notion of 'alpha function' which renders barely conscious feelings into the more manageable medium of thoughts and ideas." --Simple Bilogic in the Poems of Louis MacNeice

"...the Buddhists almost invariably ranked Buddhism as the ultimate cure while characterizing Confucianism as a worldly dharma-medicine which merely provided a view of the temporary and which, though necessary for those who were unable to achieve profound transformation because of their thin and weak capacities, needed to be transcended if salvation were to be attained."

"...the Confucians, on the other hand, brought against Buddhism a whole array of charges which suggest that they considered it to be among the worst of all heterodoxies."

The Neo-Confucian Confrontation with Buddhism: A Structural And Historical Analysis