Earth grates on my nerves. It gives me a big pain these days. That’s why I live out here. Earth is overcrowded, bureaucratic, unhealthy, and sufferin… - Roger Zelazny

In a room the size of a ballroom the Pattern was laid. The floor was black and looked smooth as glass. And on the floor was the Pattern.
It shimmered like the cold fire that it was, quivered, made the whole
room seem somehow unsubstantial. It was an elaborate tracery of bright power, composed mainly of curves, though there were a few straight lines near its middle. It reminded me of a fantastically intricate, life-scale version of one of those maze things you do with a pencil (or ballpoint, as the case may be), to get you into or out of something. Like, I could almost see the
words “Start Here,” somewhere way to the back. It was perhaps a hundred
yards across at its narrow middle, and maybe a hundred and fifty long.
It made bells ring within my head, and then came the throbbing. My mind recoiled from the touch of it. But if I were a prince of Amber, then somewhere within my blood, my nervous system, my genes, this pattern was recorded somehow, so that I would respond properly, so that I could walk the
bloody thing.

The fact remains that you would be dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point et cetera percent of the population, because we can never adequately judge the intensity of our own — let alone those of others, when we only see them from the outside. That is why no neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a full­blown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like driving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes the Shaped rather than the Shaper. The synapses respond like a fission reaction when ner­vous impulses are artificially augmented. The transference effect is almost instantaneous.

There are circumstances under which the anomalous should be courted. Ignorance is one of them.