Calling can refer not only to ways of doing – meaning work – but also to ways of being.
You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault.
In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it’s hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it’s not a vocation.
It’s a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood – the sense that motherhood isn’t itself a calling – also arises from economic pressure.
Yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.
Aptitude can show calling, but it isn’t the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough.
People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That’s a very important change in our collective psychology.
We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child’s beauty and singling that child out. That’s how the mentor system works – you’re caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.
Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being.
Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That’s a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.
I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those “troublemakers” early on and try to weed them out. That’s very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers.
Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure.
It’s the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
Our dreams recover what the world forgets.
Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.
What door is opened into soul through our wounds.
To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions.
Sometimes we act in order not to see.
As the ego does not represent the whole psyche, so the Western mind cannot speak for the whole world.
This is the emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the texts say, blacker than black – archetypally black, and thereby no longer colored by all-too-human prejudices of color.