nousrose

[nousrose]

We fashion the world that surrounds us by the intensity of our imagination and feeling, and we illuminate or darken our lives by the concepts we hold of ourselves. Nothing is more important to us than our conception of ourselves, and especially is true of our concept of the deep, dimensionally greater One within us. Those that help or hinder us, whether they know it or not, are the servants of that law which shapes outward circumstances in harmony with our inner nature. It is our conception of ourselves which frees or constrains us, though it may use material agencies to achieve its purpose. Because life molds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds, there is no way of bringing about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves. No help cometh from without: the hills to which we lift our eyes are those of an inner range. It is thus to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained. We can rely absolutely on the justice of this law to give us only that which is of the nature of ourselves. To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change.

No-One To Change But Self

Neville Goddard

[nousrose]

We invest the breaking of our barriers with some tangible form if necessary. We try to think of it as a thing. Left to ourselves, we jib at death and have to be forced to go the whole way. We are incessantly trying to hoodwink ourselves, trying to get at continuity, which implies that the boundaries have been crossed, without actually crossing the boundaries of this discontinuous life. We want to get across without taking the final step, while remaining cautiously on the hither side. We can conceive of nothing except in terms of our own life, and beyond that, it seems to us everything is wiped out. Beyond death, in fact, begins the inconceivable which we are usually not brave enough to face. Yet the inconceivable is the expression of our own impotence. We know that death destroys nothing, leaves the totality of existence intact, but we still cannot imagine the continuity of being as a whole beyond our own death, or whatever it is that dies in us. We cannot accept the fact that this has limits. At all costs we need to transcend them, but we should like to transcend them and maintain them simultaneously. As we are about to take the final step, we are beside ourselves with desire, impotent, in the clutch of a force that demands our disintegration. But the object of our urgent desire is there in front of us and it binds us to the very life that our desire will not be contained by. How sweet it is to remain in the grip of the desire to burst out without going the whole way, without taking the final step. How sweet it is to gaze long upon the object of our desire, to live on in our desire, instead of dying by going the whole way, by yielding to the excessive violence of desire.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality

Georges Bataille

[nousrose]

The acquisition of consciousness is a crime, an act of hybris against the powers-that-be; but it is a necessary crime, leading to a necessary alienation from the natural unconscious state of wholeness. If we are going to hold any loyalty to the development of consciousness, we must consider it a necessary crime. It is better to be conscious than to remain in the animal state. But in order to emerge at all, the ego is obliged to set itself up against the unconscious out of which it came and assert its relative autonomy by an inflated act. There are several different levels on which we can apply this understanding. On the deepest level it is a crime against the universal powers, the powers of nature, or God. But actually in everyday life it is generally not experienced in such religious categories, but in quite personal ways. On the personal level the act of daring to acquire a new consciousness is experienced as a crime or rebellion against the authorities that exist in one's personal environment, against one's parents, and later against other outer authorities. Any step in individuation is experienced as a crime against the collective, because it challenges the individual's identification with some representative of the collective, whether it be family, party, church, or nation. At the same time each step, since it is truly an inflated act, is not only accompanied by guilt but also runs the very real risk that one will get caught in an inflation that carries the consequences of a fall.

Ego and Archetype

Edward Edinger

[nousrose]

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there”cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti

[nousrose]

The tragedy is simply this: that new meanings can only come from the creative depths of the life force within each individual; but the individual is the last one who believes in his right to develop unique meanings. He takes everything he needs uncritically from the society at large. As a result, man's meanings, instead of being free and open, are in fact "instinctivized" — hardened into the mold of a standard social pattern. Thus, the one animal in nature who is the potentially open vehicle for the life force actually closes up that vehicle by his fear of standing on his own original meanings.

Beyond Alienation

Ernest Becker

[nousrose]

It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face…The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions…It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

The Collected Works

Carl Jung

[nousrose]

The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence. The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world.

Moksha

Aldous Huxley

[nousrose]

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some belief or some purpose he would bury in his breast? 'Tis as hard to hide as fire. He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. We can only see what we are, and if we misbehave we suspect others.

The Conduct of Life

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[nousrose]

You are in a state which is very disturbing and you do not like that state. You like the state which is quite peaceful and more profitable. Therefore, you are moving from 'what you are' to 'what you want to be' as the opposite of 'what you are', with a motive for profit. The opposite is created on account of your desire for profit or benefit, for a result; it is non-existent. Therefore, the fight between the so-called opposites is between 'what is' and 'what is not'. How can there be a fight between one which is existent and something which in non-existent apart from it? It is only on the verbal level. Therefore, the fight is an illusion, a stupid and thoughtless action. Conflict between the opposites - whether it is the left or the right, between capital and labour, between god and devil, is non-existent: because, there is only one thing, 'what is': and any movement away from 'what is' is stupidity. Therefore, the conflict has no significance. To understand the disturbing state in which you find yourself, you must first stop the fighting with the opposite which is non-existent, i.e. you must give up the struggle to become the opposite. Do not condemn that state nor identify yourself with it. Then, watch it with your whole being and be aware of it. Whenever we have a feeling, we generally name it so that we may recognise it and also communicate it, if necessary, to others. Investigation into and understanding of the feeling itself, which is changing and in movement, demands freedom from terminology, as the term is not the thing that it is supposed to denote.

Madras 23rd Group Discussion

Jiddu Krishnamurti

[nousrose]

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search.

Waiting for God

Simone Weil

[nousrose]

Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put aside all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, average - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us better but I know that it makes us deeper. Whether we learn to put our pride, our scorn, our willpower against it, like the savage who, however badly tormented, repays his tormentor with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw before pain into the oriental nothingness called nirvana - into mute, rigid, deaf self-surrender, self-forgetting, self-extinction: one emerges from such dangerous exercises in self-mastery as a different person, with a few more question marks, above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than one had previously questioned. The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one sullen. Even love of life is still possible - only one loves differently.

The Gay Science

Friedrich Nietzsche

[nousrose]

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your self into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility. History: a factory of ideals, lunatic mythology, frenzy of hordes and of solitaries. Refusal to look reality in the face, mortal thirst for fictions. The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. And if all our actions—from breathing to the founding of empires or metaphysical systems—derive from an illusion as to our importance, the same is true a fortiori of the prophetic instinct. Who, with the exact vision of his nullity, would try to be effective and to turn himself into a savior? Nostalgia for a world without ideals, for an agony without doctrine, for an eternity without life. Paradise. But we could not exist one second without deceiving ourselves: the prophet in each of us is just the seed of madness which makes us flourish in our void. The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him. I can imagine him saying: “Torn from the goal, from all goals, I retain, of my desires and my displeasures, only their formulas. Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an answer to it. The spectacle of man—what an emetic! Love—a duel of salivas. All the feelings milk their absolute from the misery of the glands. Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes. Once I had a self; now I am no more than an object. I gorge myself on all the drugs of solitude; those of the world were too weak to make me forget it. Having killed the prophet in me, how could I still have a place among men?”

A Short History of Decay

E. M. Cioran

[nousrose]

Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blindfolded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. We refuse to see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion. But since the incessant explosion constantly exhausts its resources, it can only proceed under one condition: that beings given life whose explosive force is exhausted shall make room for fresh beings coming into the cycle with renewed vigour.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality

Georges Bataille

[nousrose]

Magic is not a comfortable niche to be settled into forever. Instead, it is a transitional vehicle, a means to an end. Magic can be the awakening agent that frees its practitioner from certain illusions, allowing the flash of insight that transcends all philosophical inquiry. Through magic, the mind can learn that there is not one indisputable reality. There is an endless multiplicity of realities, none of them ultimately subject to categorization or label. The direct confrontation with Maya that sorcery allows might be said to be magic's primary objective. It is this confrontation that permits the sorcerer to viscerally understand how deeply his or her own shifting subjective overlays influence that which he or she perceives – an understanding that may hasten the transformation of human sentience to divine consciousness. Just as likely, it must be said, magic can become a self-delusive trap of its own, an addictive activity binding the magician ever more deeply to the Maya mirages he or she projects. This is the double nature of Maya, who blinds and reveals with each alternating step of her sinuous movement through time.

Demons of the Flesh

Nikolas Schreck

[nousrose]

If you're lucky, at some point in your life you'll come to a complete dead end. Or to put it another way: if you're lucky you'll come to a crossroads and see that the path to the left leads to hell, that the path to the right leads to hell, that the road straight ahead leads to hell and that if you try to turn around you'll end up in complete and utter hell. Every way leads you to hell and there's no way out, nothing left for you to do. Nothing can possibly satisfy you anymore. Then, if you're ready, you'll start to discover inside yourself what you always longed for but were never able to find.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom

Peter Kingsley

[nousrose]

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the loved person. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm

[nousrose]

Trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

Trickster Makes This World

Lewis Hyde