Sunday, April 24, 2005

By Author Unknown

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk their love.
To lovei s to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The one who risks nothing does nothing and has nothing ---
finally is nothing.
He may avoid sufferings and sorrow,
But he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love.
Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited freedom.
Only one who risks is free!

Friday, April 15, 2005

Carl Jung - The Man who does not sell his soul

It is perfectly true that the man who is not superfluous, the man who is needed, is the one who has not sold his soul to an organization, who is able to stand by himself and for himself. Such a man is always necessary just because most people don't stand alone; they sell their souls, and then there is no freedom. The only trace of freedom and the only hope is, of course, in the one who is not devoured by the monster, who can deal with it, who can ride the monster. Therefore, the old Chinese represented their heroes or their great sages as riding the monster. When Confucius was asked what he thought of Lao-tse, whom he did not know personally, he said he didn't know whether he was an expert at weapons, or at driving carts, but however that might be, he knew he was an expert at riding dragons. He knew how to deal with the monster, that is. Now, the dragon is of course the symbol for the collective unconscious. It also means the crowd within; it is the crowd soul, the collective soul of man. So over against that monster is the man who doesn't sell his soul to it, and he is needed. He should be careful and even should seek a certain solitude in order to maintain his isolation. But he would also be lost if he didn't know how to deal with the crowd.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Carl Jung on Logos & Eros

Logos is a certain peculiar quality in a man's being which leads him to discriminate, to reason, to judge, to divide, to understand in a particular way.

And one cannot understand all this without also thinking of its antithesis, the equally intuitive concept of Eros, which would be then a principle of relatedness, seeing things together, gathering things together, establishing relations between things, not judging things, not looking at them properly, but rather attracting or repelling them.

Logos also contains the idea of the word; legein means to talk, to speak. It is another characteristic of man that he insists upon giving voice to an idea, designating it, giving a name, making a concept, expressing it, while woman, chracterized more by Eros, can leave things in suspens; they have not necessarily to be SAID. A man says, "Why the devil don't you say so?" but a woman doesn't need to say so, and usually she doesn't. Or she says something else, and a man is always convinced that she has said just the thing she should not have said. Therefore, men's ideas about women --- about their talk, you know: gossip and afternoon tea, that intricate talk, the indirect vague way of women. If he carefully follows up such a conversation, however, he sees that she is like a spider weaving a web. The talk of women, being round-about, doesn't consist of words but of spider webs, and they have a purpose different from that of a man.

A woman's world is strange to a man.

Nonetheless, Anatole France is quite right when he says that when men have worked things up to a fix, they must call in an intelligent woman.