Archive for the 'quotes' Category

Man’s task is . . .

Published
by
Ken
on December 23, 2007
in carl jung and quotes
. 0 Comments
. . . to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326

Sphere: Related Content

Ah, to be a pre-tribulationalist/pre-millenialist

Published
by
Ken
on December 23, 2007
in alan watts, buddhism, environment, fundamentalism, god and quotes
. 1 Comment

That’s the hakuna mattata way of thinking. No worries because God’s gonna save our asses before things get real bad. So all these environmental, racial, terrorism, educational, political, &c. issues are God’s problem, not ours. He’ll clean them all up before his 1000 year reign and he’ll have 7 long years to do it — piece of cake for the great omnipotent one.

Ah, t’would be easier, t’wouldn’t it!

But back on the sane planet Earth, I’m watching a show about the biggest science discoveries of 2007 and one of them was that we lost an amount of ice in the Arctic equal in surface area to half of the U.S.A.! They didn’t expect that amount of loss for another 30 years but it happened this year! Talk about ahead of schedule.

So, I’m watching this show and imagining cities under domes to protect them from the poisonous atmosphere and scorching temperatures; and cave dwelling, marauding hordes of starving, bear-skin-wearing pirates; and underground cities where the temperature is cool enough to sustain life but it’s completely dark so the people mutate into walking, talking mole-people. And I’m imagining all this happening in the next 20 years or so because it’s getting serious out there, folks. It’s all rather depressing.

Then I ran across “On Hopelessness” at Sacred Awe. Fitting title, I thought, for my mood. One of the excellent points made in this meditation is that of “committed action, non-attachment to outcome.” This comes from Buddhism but I think it can be equally stated as “love your neighbor as yourself, do not worry about tomorrow.” You know, maybe it’s because I grew up with the “Christian version” and I heard the words so often that I became almost numb to them, but a simple rephrasing in different words makes the difficulty in carrying it out much more clear. Non-attachment to outcome: it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t lie awake at night worrying about all the changes that are raining into your life like fire and brimstone, just do what you have to do right now. Non-attachment to outcome: don’t worry about being annihilated but don’t expect God to save your ass, either.

Something else from the mediation was part of a poem by Patricia Lay-Dorsay:

But it’s OK if sometimes we’re out of balance because the Universe goes on whether we’re along for the ride or not. Nothing humanity can do will disrupt the perfect balance of the Universe. We are not that powerful. Even though our choices can throw certain elements like climate species survival land and water ecology out of whack nothing we can do will throw off the beauty of the Universe itself.

I appreciate the motivation behind this poem but, honestly, my first reaction was: knowing the Universe will outlast our globally-warmed, nuclear-weapon-destroyed, raped-to-the-point-of-sterility little planet is not a whole lot of comfort. Maybe I just need to get out and look at the stars more often but I live in a city and it was snowing all day so there weren’t any to see. But maybe there is more here . . .

I’m not really sure it is relevant, but the first thing I thought of was the following from Alan Watts’ Myth and Religion where he is talking about the Hindu and Buddhist concept that “everybody is a manifestation of the divine, playing this game and that game. Your not knowing it, if you do not know it, is part of the game. It makes it all the more fun.” Watts says:

I would say to those among you who are the most ignorant, unspiritual, and stuffy, Congratulations! You are so lost in the game you do not even know where you stand, and are taking a gorgeous risk. Because of you we might even blow up the planet, and how close are we going to get with that one? In the same way as that car racer watches the speedometer needle going up, up, and up, there are people feeling more and more self-righteously determined that good shall prevail in the world, all the while watching that needle of world tension go up. It is getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and finally we may all go out in a blaze of glory. When the dust settles they will say, “That was quite a dream we have just woken up from. What shall we do next?”

Talk about non-attachment to outcome! But how do you get there??? That seems to be the question I’m asking a lot these days. I can see — off in the distance, across the chasm — an alternative viewpoint, one that seems like it will actually work for me (unlike Fundamental Christianity) but the bridge is out, my GPS is broken and it’s the longest, moonless night of the year. So, for now, I’m walking around in circles waiting for sunrise.

Sphere: Related Content

Anais Nin and Carl Jung

Published
by
Ken
on December 22, 2007
in carl jung, myth and quotes
. 0 Comments

As I paused in my computer programming to take a break after finally getting the regression test to give me the right answer, I spotted one of Anais Nin’s diaries on the floor of my office. It was volume 4: 1944-1947.

I picked it up and opened to a random page and read:

There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche. . . . The time has come to give the psyche a concrete symbolism.

Another random page led me to:

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery. . . . The primitive and the poet never parted company. . . . Intellectual knowledge is not enough. Music, the dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our blood stream. Ideas do not. . . . There is a prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision. But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life. Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward. . . . The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images. Each one of us must re-create the world.

Wow, I thought, this sounds a lot like Carl Jung! So, I did a quick search and found out that Nin actually underwent therapy with Jung! Talk about synchronicity!

The second quote is very meaningful today. In this age of science, many people think that “intellectual knowledge” is enough but it’s not. Objectivity is sought in everything and expected everywhere and it’s thought that this leads to a more complete picture of our reality but it doesn’t.

I would emphasis the “its own images” part of the second to last sentence. Symbols and images are extremely important as they are the mediators between us and the archetypes or collective unconscious. They are how we deal with our “inner world” which is there whether we believe in it or not. We need symbols and myths for our age of science and science itself is not giving them to us. Trying to use the symbols from yesteryear is not working either — simply look at the rejection of all the “old time religions” that is going on. This is not to say that religion is wrong or bad; on the contrary religion is exactly what supplies the symbols and images we need. But we need symbols that are meaningful to us today in this age of science and not the symbols from earlier generations.

Sphere: Related Content

The psychic mediator

Published
by
Ken
on December 18, 2007
in bible, god, quotes and religion
. 0 Comments
According to the psychological standpoint man cannot get outside his own psyche. All experience is therefore psychic experience. This means that it is impossible, experientially, to distinguish between God and the God-image in the psyche.

Edward F. Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man

The Bible, it seems to me, (and especially the O.T.) is all about how God relates to people. And it was recorded by those people to whom God was relating. So, we end up with several layers of mediation: God — absolute truth, unchanging, eternal — interacts with people who mediate this interaction through their psyches — including all their biases, prejudices, preconceptions — and then record this interaction. We then have other people (like you and me) reading about those interactions but we are mediating what we read through our own psyches — including all our biases, prejudices, preconceptions — to arrive at “God” which is really just the God-image in our own psyches (reflected from the God-image in the Biblical writer’s psyches). And some people have the nerve to say that this IS God.

Suppose my daughter, in a few years, starts writing about me in a journal. Then, 20 years later, you read this journal. How close will the picture you have of me be to the “real” me? Now think about someone reading this journal in 2000 or 4000 years! Unlike you, they will have almost nothing in common with my daughter — culturally, socially, technologically. How close will their picture of me be to the “real” me? For them to say that they know me, in any definition of the word, seems almost ludicrous.

 

Sphere: Related Content

the Word finds expression in other traditions

Published
by
Ken
on December 1, 2007
in christianity, jesus, quotes, religion and tolerance
. 0 Comments

Found the following on Exploring Our Matrix and couldn’t agree more:

When we hear the words ascribed to Jesus in John’s Gospel, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me’, we do not hear them in a narrowly exclusive way. In John’s gospel, let us remember, the words of Jesus are the words of the Logos, not just of the individual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. That Word or Logos enlightens every one who comes into the world. Those of us who are Christians believe that we have heard it loud and clear in Jesus Christ and that we need not look beyond him. But we do not deny that the Word finds expression in other traditions, and, indeed, in the whole creation

— John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought

Sphere: Related Content

A reminder from the Dr.

Published
by
Ken
on November 27, 2007
in quotes
. 0 Comments
“How could it be so?
“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
“Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more!”

– Dr. Suess, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Sphere: Related Content

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels

Published
by
Ken
on November 22, 2007
in quotes
. 0 Comments

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

— Robert Ardrey

Sphere: Related Content

Rely on God for every thing????

Published
by
Ken
on October 10, 2007
in god, jesus, money, quotes and thomas merton
. 0 Comments

Thomas Merton, in Echoing Silence, writes:

Naturally, while sometimes you are very quiet and happy because God is very obviously with you, with a presence & blessedness you never imagined possible, at other times this is not so. Then you try to pray or think of Christ and your mind instead of filling with peace, fills with slogans, He-she jokes, movies so bad you had forgotten them by the self-protective work of your own subconscious mind. You think of million dollar advertising ideas, and this makes you very ashamed, and bored, & disgusted. This is a trial common to our life, & has good effects, one of the principal of which is to make you love God not only for His obvious gifts, but realizing clearly, by His apparent absence, how infinitely preferable He is to everything else. That this absence is only apparent is clear from St. John of the Cross, and all the others, & everybody here knows it perfectly well, and really, you feel bad some days, but it is nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.

This really stopped in my tracks when I read this: “how infinitely preferable He is to everything else.” According to Merton it’s not a tough decision with God coming in at 51%. It’s a hands down victory. God is infinitely preferable to everything else!! How many of us can say that? I can’t. If we saw God as infinitely preferable to a satisfying job, fashion, a new romance, football, financial security, sex, coffee, the latest high-tech gadget, then Jesus’ call to sell our possessions, leave our families, and suffer injury & injustice would be a no-brainer.

Then Merton says that the bad days when God seems absent are “nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.” That’s another tough one. If I think about the worst days of my life, I’m not sure that the days I was pining for God would make the list. Now, I had bad days where God was absent. Believe you me. I remember begging God, pleading with him to make himself known to me. He didn’t and eventually I served him with divorce papers. But were those the worst days I’ve experienced? I don’t think so.

Then Merton continues:

Also, as soon as this is done with, your mind unexpectedly fills up with the presence of God twice as real and twice as holy as before. For another result of these temptations is to make you very docile, very detached from your own opinions and judgments & way of doing things, and then you rely on God for the smallest things, for every thing. And this is peace, because God gives everybody everything, & the only reason each person doesn’t have more is that he gets in God’s way, trying to get things with our own dumb will.

Docile and detached from our own opinions and judgments. Hmmmmm. In how many people do I see this? It seems to me that the greatest self-proclaimed Christians are some of the most opinionated and judgmental people around. And how many of us rely on God for every thing? I know I don’t. Hell, if I relied on God for every thing I’d quit my job and blog 16 hours a day. Instead we got to get up and make the donuts. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The car ain’t gonna fix itself.

But can you imagine relying on God for every thing? Just think about that. That’s got to be like being a kid on summer vacation again. Mom makes your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No job. No school. Dad buys your clothes. You get driven everywhere. All you have to do is play and watch TV. If that’s not peace, I don’t know what is. But the trick is really and truly relying on someone else. For every thing. For most of us, our control-freak nature takes over and tries to do God’s job. Then all we end up doing is worrying and all that ends up doing us giving us heartburn, insomnia, and ulcers.

Oh, to have faith. Life would be so much easier!

Sphere: Related Content

Can’t get there from here …

Published
by
Ken
on October 7, 2007
in born again, carl jung, god, holy spirit and quotes
. 0 Comments

… unless we’re already there and just don’t know it.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect in salvation. If we are totally depraved and can do nothing good without God then how can we receive the gift of God’s son? How can we, as sinners, bring ourselves to realize that we even need God let alone bring ourselves to find God? Through the urging of the Holy Spirit? I think not because the Holy Spirit needs to appeal to something in us which can know God and we in our sinful state cannot.

By way of (obviously imperfect, as all examples are) example, let’s say that I am trying to get Joe, who has been blind from birth, to understand the color red. He has been separated from color all his life (born color-depraved, so to speak) and so has nothing within himself with which he can begin to understand color. No matter how hard I press and explain and urge him to understand the color red, it isn’t going to happen. Any understanding of the color red at which Joe does arrive will, obviously and necessarily, be extremely different from the understanding that I have.

Isn’t that the predicament we are in? If we are 100% separated from God and always have been (and I’m talking about each person and not “man” and “woman” as created by God) then there is no way we are going to understand anything about God no matter how hard the Holy Spirit urges. Unless there us a bit of God in us — a seed or a kernel — then there is no way we can understand our need of God’s salvation and no way we can receive it. This reminds me of something C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

We all have a “divine life” in us. We all have the image of God within. Sometimes that image is buried quite deeply and we have absolutely no recollection of it but it’s there. It has to be there in order for the Holy Spirit to work. So we are not given the image of God when we are “saved” but that (perhaps tiny) part of us that already is the image of God is brought to our attention.

Sphere: Related Content

Merton on Sophia

Published
by
Ken
on October 1, 2007
in quotes, sophia and thomas merton
. 0 Comments
The beauty of all creation is a reflection of Sophia living and hidden in creation. But it is only our reflection. And the misleading thing about beauty, created beauty, is that we expect Sophia to be simply a more intense and more perfect and more brilliant, unspoiled, spiritual revelation of the same beauty. Whereas to arrive at her beauty we must pass through an apparent negation of created beauty, and to reach her light we must realize that in comparison with created light it is darkness. But this is only because created beauty and light are ugliness and darkness compared with her. Again the whole thing is in the question of mercy, which cuts across the divisions and passes beyond every philosophical and religious ideal. For Sophia is not an ideal, not an abstraction, but the highest reality, and the highest reality must manifest herself to us not only in power but also in poverty, otherwise we never see it. Sophia is the Lady Poverty to whom St. Francis was married. And of course she dwelt with the Desert Fathers in their solitude, for it was she who brought them there and she whom they knew there. It was with her that they conversed all the time in their silence.

Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence

Sphere: Related Content