The average civilized person considers much that is human alien to him - precisely the opposite of Terence’s definition of being human. Once I was walking down a street in Manhattan with two (very smart) friends, and I started philosophizing about the pleasure of killing and eating one’s foes as a mode of revenge. I [...]
I have always had a poor New Yorker’s skepticism of “therapy” - shrinks and psychoanalysis. That sort of thing, goes the prejudice, is for Manhattanites; and it never cures them anyway. In fact, it is likely to make people more self-centered and self-justifying than ever. An acquaintance with Freud’s writings, and the atrocious way that [...]
In the endless self-repeating
Flows for ever more the Same;
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
Hold at rest the mighty Frame;
Streams from all things love of living,
Grandest star and humblest clod;
All the straining, all the striving,
Is eternal rest in God.
- GOETHE
In any good religion, there should be something utterly unpalatable, something horrifying and blood-chilling; it could not otherwise [...]
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.” – Carl Jung
An old paperback I possess advertises its author thus: “Doctor and scientist, visionary and thinker, Carl Jung ranks with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as one of the great minds of the twentieth century.” I [...]
I was struck by the diocese of New York removing from the Easter Vigil the reading of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; presumably because the story scandalizes nice good people who want religion to look hunky-dory and sweet. But obviously, if God cannot work through horror and crime and sin and cruelty then He can’t be terribly [...]
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons… I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and [...]
“For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire. Unfortunately he again and again finds hirelings who open the gates of their country to this international incendiary.” - Adolf Hitler, describing Winston Churchill in 1941.
Do we need any further proof of [...]
Time spent among people reveals just how difficult it is, even for the most worthy and competent, to be capable of real love and relationship. Developing this capacity is in truth the sole bifocal commandment of the Christian religion, all others being mere ancillae; and it is also the goal of Jung’s school of psychoanalysis, [...]
“Seems, madame? Nay it is; I know not seems.” - Hamlet
Helen Luke is not one of the easier writers to write about. She appeared as a guide in my life when I began to feel the difference between exterior and interior, fact and meaning, appearance and reality. These distinctions are not for everyone nor [...]
Synchronicity - the Acausal Connecting Principle.
26-May-10I remember while studying Thoreau in depth, I got a terrible desire to listen to Don Henley music, for no apparent reason. I went out and bought his greatest hits album, in which it stated that he was giving a portion of the proceeds to the Walden Woods Project, to save the woods around Walden [...]