The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-ax. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.
What ages is not merely your functions and organs, but the whole of your nature, that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.
Why do I prefer insurance to the invisible guarantees of existence?
The deepest subjectivity is not personal.
The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination.
So it is customary to see in a mother’s ideals and intensity of ambition what is carried out by one or another of her children. According to biographers, the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting – or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.
Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.
The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking.
Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.
To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.
Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible. – M. Merleau-Ponty, Working Notes.
This sentence, “I love you,” parroted back and forth by child and parent may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas, and anxieties.
One of the goals of alchemists was to concoct the “elixir,” a panacea that would heal all ills and prolong all lives. This miraculous substance had many names, the most inclusive being lapis philosophorum, philosophers’ stone.
In contemporary psychological language, efficiency is a primary mode of denial.
More: as the cure depends on care, so does caring sometimes mean nothing more than carrying.
Jung says we must look at the intentionality of the characters and where they are heading, for they are the main influence upon the shape of the stories. Each carries his own plot with him, writing his story, both backwards and forwards, as he individuates. Jung gives far more weight to individual character than either to narrative or to plot. If.
My practice tells me I can no longer distinguish clearly between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and psychopathology of world. Moreover, it tells me that to place neurosis and psychopathology solely in personal reality is a delusional repression of what is actually, realistically, being experienced.
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
For any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?
Perception bestows blessing – as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.