Gary Lachman Quotes

United States, Writer
December 24, 1955

Gary Joseph Lachman, also known as Gary Valentine, is an American writer and musician. He came to prominence in the mid-1970s as the bass guitarist for the punk rock/new wave band Blondie. Since the 1990s, Lachman has written full-time, often about mysticism and occultism.

Also known as Musician, Guitarist

It’s not enough to withdraw from society and seek your own salvation, your own individuation. The individuator must return to society (“collectivity”) to contribute his or her new insights, his or her new values, which must be at least equal to if not greater than the norm.

Gary Lachman Blondie
- Enough
- Values
- Equal
In both the mystical and the paranormal there seems to be a kind of direct knowing, not mediated by the usual routines of the intellect. In both a kind of shift of consciousness occurs, a kind of turning inward that reveals another world.

Gary Lachman Blondie

Post-modernism ‘ironises’ out all questions of meaning. It reduces everything to the ‘been there, done that’ mentality, and shrinks the world to a theory of everything that can fit on a T-shirt. It lets us off the hook. We no longer have to be good, just good enough. It lowers the existential bar, and moves the metaphysical goal posts closer, or gets rid of them entirely.

Gary Lachman Blondie
- World
- Theory
- T-shirt
The outcome, if successful, in both alchemy and individuation is a union of opposites—the coniunctionis or transcendent function—leading to alchemical gold, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or, in Jungian terms, the Self.

Gary Lachman Blondie
Each act of imagination, each moment of creative life stands up to the entire material universe and affirms the reality of meaning against the corroding solvents of entropy, dark matter, or whatever else may be dragging the physical world into oblivion.

Gary Lachman Blondie
- Reality
- Moment
- Oblivion