“Man’s fate has always swung between day and night. There is nothing we can do to change this.”
— Carl Jung
“Deeply ingrained in the infantile psyche is the conscious or unconscious assumption that the cure for depression is to replace it with pleas and happy feelings, whereas the only valid cure for any kind of depression lies in the acceptance of real suffering. To climb out of it any other way is simply a palliative, laying the foundations for the next depression. Nothing whatever has happened to the soul. The roots of all our neuroses lie here, in the conflict between the longing for growth and freedom and our incapacity or refusal to pay the price in suffering.”
— Carl Jung
“We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is . We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are.”
— Carl Jung
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
— Susan Sontag
We are not Black Holes. Our darkness does not consume light. Rich and fertile, it is the very stuff out of which our light is made.
“…we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.”