Paradox

Paradoxically, what we fear most is love. When someone loves us completely, abandons oneself totally to us, then we are no longer our own. Often, we try to insulate ourselves against such love because it asks the same of us. Partial love we can handle, but total love begets a running fear in us: instinctively, we hide.


Rev Edward J Farrell

life's problems

The serious problems in life are never fully solved. The meaning and the purpose of a problem seem not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.


Carl Jung

Robert Frost: Escapist - Never

He is no fugitive -- escaped, escaping,
No one has seen him stumble looking back,
His fear is not behind him but beside him
On either hand to make his course perhaps
A crooked straightness yet no less a straightness.
He runs face forward. He is a pursuer,
He seeks a seeker who in his turn seeks
Another still, lost far into the distance.
Any who seek him seek in him the seeker.
His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
It is the future that creates his present.
He is an interminable chain of longing.

Robert Frost

Images in St Teresa of Avila

Images found in The Interior Castle: castle, water, journey, serpent and devil, butterfly, marriage and Christ.

The castle image calls us to center our lives. Water speaks to the hidden depths which contain a great deal of our life. Journey as an image alerts us to passages or transitions which will inevitably be part of our development. Serpents and devils express the darkness we experience in life, and butterflies remind us of the newness that comes to be in the darkness. Marriage expresses the healing and wholeness we ache for, within our persons, our communities, and with God. And finally, the symbol of Christ points to the fullness of life we attain when we are in union with the divine presence in our lives.


Spiritual Pilgrims - Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila
John Welch

St John of the Cross

"To attain to this which you know not,
you must pass through that which you know not.
To attain to that which you possess not,
you must pass through that which you possess not.
To attain to that which you are not,
you pass through that which you are not."

St John of the Cross

The Space between Thoughts

In a receptive state of mind, we strive, through meditation, to catch a glimpse of the clear light of the intermediate state as it presents itself while we sit. Observing the meaningless flow of thoughts that pass through the mind, one should try not to become involved. Just let them be. A thought that is ignored soon goes away. And there it is! The space between thoughts.

At first, when we begin to practise, this small glimpse of reality quickly passes and the mind is again flooded with attractive thoughts that have us by the nose. Unable to resist their lure, we follow helplessly and are once more entangled in their snare until the whole train of ideas comes to some kind of conclusion. Then, suddenly, there it is again! That small gap between one thought and the next. That small gleam of clear light, utterly devoid of graspable form or content.

The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead, Stephen Hodge

whatever is really good

Poet: Lead me rather to the quiet nook that is my heaven,
the only place where a poet can be happy
and can cultivate his precious gift among those who love and cherish him.
The verses, good or bad, that spring to his lips from deep within him
are crowded out n the rough-and-tumble of the day.
You have to wait for years to see them in their true light.
Showy things are just meant for the moment,
but whatever is really good comes through to posterity.


Goethe, Faust

St Christopher

According to the legend, St Christopher, the patron of all travellers, felt an arrogant pride in his tremendous physical strength, and was willing to serve only the strongest. First he served a king; but when he saw that the king feared the devil, he left him and became the devil's servant. Then one day he discovered that the devil feared the Crucifix, and so he decided to serve Christ if he could find him. He followed the advice of a priest who told him to wait for Christ at a ford. In the years that passed, he carried many people across the river. But once, in a dark, stormy night, a small child called out that he wanted to be carried over the river. With the greatest ease, St Christopher lifted the child on to his shoulders, but he walked more slowly with every step, for his burden became heavier and heavier. When he arrived in mid-stream, he felt "as if he carried the whole universe." He realized then taht he had taken Christ upon his shoulders -- and Christ gave him remission of his sins and eternal life.

This miraculous child is a symbol of the Self that literally "depresses" the ordinary human being, even though it is the only thing that can redeem him.

The Process of Individuation, M L von Franz

T S Eliot

"The awful daring of a moment's surrender,
which an age of prudence can never retreat."


The Waste Land

mystery

"Animus ad amplitudinem Mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur; non Mysteriaad augustias animi constringantur."

(Let the mind, so far as it can, be open to the fullness of the mysteries;
let not the mysteries be constrained to fit the narrower confines of the mind.)

Bacon

Gospel of Thomas

"If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Gospel of Thomas

http://www.gnosis.org

No one understands

"No one understands, only a poet could begin to understand."

Carl Jung

All things ephemeral

All things ephemeral
Are but a reflection;
The unattainable
Here finds perfection;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The Eternal Feminine
Still draws us on.

James Joyce

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a
yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

© 1915 Robert Frost

My fav net radio

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

From E M Brainard

Who never wept knows laughter but a jest;
Who never failed, no victory has sought;
Who never suffered, never lived its best;
Who never doubted, never really thought;
Who never feared, real courage has not shown;
Who never faltered, lacks a real intent;
Whose soul was never troubled has not known
The sweetness and the peace of real content.

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!

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.

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.

Carl Jung - Aspects of the Feminine

“Love requires depth and loyalty of feelings; without them it is not love but mere caprice. True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. Love is not cheap --- let us therefore beware of cheapening it!”