This is what it means to be human, to feel the pain, the grief, the stress, the risk, the fear, the heartbreak. So you, beautiful creature, you here is your permission slip to feel it all, to feel the joy and delight and excitement and the sorrow and fear and despair. All the yellows and pinks and violets and grays, because you are the whole damn sky.
Kate Bowler
There seems to be two distinct kinds of so-called ‘spiritual’ activity one can engage in. On the one hand there is a search and a seeking for external answers or The Answer – the ultimate healing Truth or as Zen teacher Barry Magid would say ‘curative fantasies.’
And on the other hand there is an ongoing rigorous curiosity into the nature of one’s own mind. Intense open-ended scrutiny and honest investigation of reality as we experience it for ourselves requiring no external beliefs, wisdom, teachings or guides.
Ironically, as the Buddha is thought to have said, ‘be a light unto yourself.’ Or as Robert Saltzman says ‘you can only find your own mind, no one else’s.’
Paradoxically it is the latter activity that actually reveals what the former seeks.
You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.
Albert Ellis
We let go in the measure that we are willing to confront our deepest fears. We experience freedom in proportion to the responsibility we take for our relationship with the whole.
Shiv Sengupta
Modern man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food and, above all, a large array of neuroses.
Carl Jung
You don’t live in the moment, you are the moment. You don’t have a life, you are life.
My own childhood can attest to the veracity of this quotation…
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Jung
Our children don’t learn from what we tell them or say about life but from how we actually behave and live our own lives.
…in each case you have to try to figure out what the addictive substance means symbolically. Otherwise, it will hold an almost religious significance. Now that most people do not have a religious focus, the religious focus will go on to something material.
Marion Woodman
I have been through some terrible things in my life. Some of which actually happened.
Mark Twain
We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal… But there is the consolation of no exit… Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament… and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.
Leonard Cohen
You're on Earth. There's no cure for that!
Samuel Beckett
What makes life unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
Charlotte ‘Joko’ Beck
Profound, lasting contentment in life emerges automatically and effortlessly only from an honest recognition, acceptance and gratitude in the realities of existence.
We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up,
This is our world.
All we have to do after that—
Is to die.Ikkyu
Individuation strives for the living cooperation of all psychic factors…
…This is also a state in which there is no longer absolute certainty, but everything is in a process of becoming and is therefore more or less relative…
Toni Wolff
America is too sentimental. Freedom and free market, liberty and equal jobs and democracy for everybody, world police looking for order, preventing cruelty. This is a rose-colored sentimentality that is the shadow of brutality.
Marie-Louise von Franz
All down the ages the existence of a supreme value has been attested by religious and mystical people, but Jung's gift to his generation is the discovery that this value lies within the human psyche itself. Moreover, he has elaborated a method by which it can be sought there, without the necessity of any dogma or belief
Eleanor Bertine
We are nature. The energy of our thoughts and feelings germinate like seedlings. Our ideas and imaginative fantasies unfold like ferns, our concepts and language expand in all directions like trees.
Everything is always it. Even that which emerges from us that claims not to be or seems not to be - is still an essential and integral part of our whole differentiated yet indivisible aliveness.