We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul’s way of working on itself.
You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.
Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.
Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?
Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.
It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.
I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I’m in the psyche...
We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?
Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.
Without time for loss you don’t have time for soul.
Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.
Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity.
We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.
I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can’t go back over that again. I can’t put that into a two-word answer. I can’t. Wherever I go, people say, “Can I ask you a quick question?” It’s always, “a quick question.” Well, my answers are slow.
Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it’s also in the system, the society.
You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.