/similar_quotes/1081

Food of the Gods
Author: Terence McKenna
Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)
61

Symbols allow us to store information outside of the physical brain. This creates for us a relationship to the past very different from that of our animal companions. Finally, we must add to any analysis of the human picture the notion of self‑directed modification of activity. We are able to modify our behavior patterns based on a symbolic analysis of past events, in other words, through history. Through our ability to store and recover information as images and written records, we have created a human environment as much conditioned by symbols and languages as by biological and environmental factors.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
389

The line runs, as we saw, from the archetype as an effective transpersonal figure to the idea, and then to the 'concept' which one 'forms.'  A good example of this is the concept of God, which now derives wholly from the sphere of consciousness - or purports to derive from it, as the ego is deluded enough to pretend.  There is no longer anything transpersonal, but only personal; there are no more archetypes, but only concepts; no more symbols, only signs.\n\n 'This splitting off of the unconscious leads on the one hand to an ego life emptied of meaning, and on the other hand to an activation of the deeper-lying layers which, now grown destructive, devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses.  For an upsetting of the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly.  Even when it is not so acute as to bring on a psychic sickness, the loss of instinct and the overaccentuation of the ego have consequences which, multiplied a millionfold, constellate the crisis of civilization.


To Have or to Be?
Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)
0

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.  This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above.  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.  If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life.  If I can say to somebody else, 'I love you,' I must be able to say, 'I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.