/tag/birth

28 quotes tagged 'birth'

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

393

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary. The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened. The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations. These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men. Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole. By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon. Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

377

The hero is not creative in the sense that he decorates embellishes the existing canon, although his creativeness may also manifest itself in shaping and transforming the archetypal contents of his age. The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition and the power of the collective, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.

376

The important thing is that the archetypal canon is always created and brought to birth by 'eccentric' individuals. These are the founders of religions, sects, philosophies, political sciences, ideologies, and spiritual movements, in the security of which the collective man lives without needing to come into contact with the primordial fire of direct revelation, or to experience the throes of creation.

210

By freeing the captive and raising the treasure, a man gains possession of his soul's treasures, which are not just 'wishes,' i.e., images of something he has not got but would like to have, but possibilities, i.e., images of something he could have and ought to have. The task of the hero, which is to 'awaken those sleeping images that can and must come forth from the night, in order to give the world a better face,' is far indeed from 'masturbation.' And yet it is a preoccupation with oneself, a case of letting the libido stream inward, without a partner - a kind of masturbatory self-fertilization in the uroboric manner, which alone makes possible the creative process of psychic palingenesis or self-birth.

The time of the beginning, before the coming of the opposites, must be understood as the self-description of that great epoch when there was still no consciousness. It is the wu chi of Chinese philosophy, whose symbol is the empty circle. Everything is still in the 'now and for ever' of eternal being; sun, moon, and stars, these symbols of time and therefore of mortality, have not yet been created; and day and night, yesterday and tomorrow, genesis and decay, the flux of life and birth and death, have not yet entered into the world. This prehistoric state of being is not time, but eternity, just as the time before the coming of man and before birth and begetting is eternity. And just as there is no time before the birth of man and ego, only eternity, so there is no space, only infinity.

Effects of Psychedelics on Society

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: psychedelicsalon.com (2013)

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-365-effects-of-psychedelics-on-society/

Maybe there's a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger organism and when it comes time for something to happen which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenetic rescripting of what is going on and suddenly animals which were perfectly happy hunting on the velts of Africa begin making art, watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet. I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological phenomenon under the control of the environment. It isn't something that is going against the environment. \n\nNow the objection to that is that it looks so bad - it looks cancerous - but the obvious counter to that is birth! I mean, birth is - there's a lot of bloodshed, people make sounds as though they were in great pain - they are in great pain - it has all the attributes that we associate with the violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise opposite: it is the birthing of the new generation. It is unavoidable and it is perfectly natural. \n\nAs a woman grows pregnant and she loses her sylph-like form and becomes heavier and clumsy and all these changes which go on in pregnancy - maybe something like what has happened to the Earth over the last 20,000 years. The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else. Obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and you say, 'These two can't stay together much longer. They're becoming a problem.' The mother can't function, the child is in danger, and like the birth situation where if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in. Then everything goes haywire, then both parties are in danger and their has to be emergency intervention. I don't really think we've reached that point, but I think we have come to term. As you know, concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of it all, where it all comes together, and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on forever, and then it ends, and the baby is born and everything is seen to be alright. \n\nI think the 20th century is not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity - it's actually happening and it's ripping our society and planet to pieces, but what will come out of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny and I hope that we are going to be privileged to be midwives of this process. To be there on that great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process - the wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, 'Now I understand what all that was about.'\n\nThat's I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics: being in on that process, because if you're in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define yourself as a victim, you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: kindle import (0)

If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its 'parts,' are doing—that is, of its behavior—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog. It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out 'how they are made.' This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitive and unreliable science of astrology—as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's, character or soul, he draws a horoscope—that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment—social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical—throughout every moment of his life.

In times past, recognition of the impermanence of the world usually led to withdrawal. On the one hand, ascetics, monks, and hermits tried to exorcise their desires so as to regard the world with benign resignation, or to draw back and back into the depths of consciousness to become one with the Self in its unmanifest state of eternal serenity. On the other hand, others felt that the world was a state of probation where material goods were to be used in a spirit of stewardship, as loans from the Almighty, and where the main work of life is loving devotion to God and to man. Yet both these responses are based on the initial supposition that the individual is the separate ego, and because this supposition is the work of a double-bind any task undertaken on this basis—including religion—will be self-defeating. Just because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony response to life. For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all forms of life, the world would be static, rhythmless, undancing, mummified. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real 'I' is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

In all previous periods architectural innovations were designed exclusively for the ruling classes. Now for the first time a new architecture has been specifically designed for the poor. The aesthetic poverty and vast proliferation of this new experience in habitation stem from its mass character, which character in turn stems both from its function and from the modern conditions of construction. The obvious core of these conditions is the authoritarian decisionmaking which abstractly converts the environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere as soon as industrialization has begun, even in the countries that are furthest behind in this regard, as an essential foundation for implanting the new type of social existence. The contradiction between the growth of society’s material powers and the continued lack of progress toward any conscious control of those powers is revealed as glaringly by the developments of urbanism as by the issues of thermonuclear weapons or of birth control (where the possibility of manipulating heredity is already on the horizon).

The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between the cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples. The religions that evolved out of Judaism were abstract universal acknowledgments of an irreversible time that had become democratized and open to all, but only in the realm of illusion. Time is totally oriented toward a single final event: “The Kingdom of God is soon to come.” These religions were rooted in the soil of history, but they remained radically opposed to history. The semihistorical religions establish a qualitative point of departure in time (the birth of Christ, the flight of Mohammed), but their irreversible time—introducing an accumulation that would take the form of conquest in Islam and of increasing capital in Reformation Christianity—is inverted in religious thought and becomes a sort of countdown: waiting for time to run out before the Last Judgment and the advent of the other, true world. Eternity has emerged from cyclical time, as something beyond it. It is also the element that restrains the irreversibility of time, suppressing history within history itself by positioning itself on the other side of irreversible time as a pure point into which cyclical time returns and disappears. Bossuet will still say: “By way of time, which passes, we enter eternity, which does not pass.”

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

Author: John M. Allegro

Publisher: Paperjacks (1971)

A great deal of the mythology of the ancient Near East hinges on the theme of the dying and rising god. It is usually, and correctly, seen as symbolism in story form of the processes of nature whereby in the heat of summer the earth's greenness disappears in death, to reappear the following spring in new birth. But, as we shall see, in the life cycle of the mushroom this natural cycle was quickened to a matter of days or even hours. The fungus was a microcosm of the whole fertility process, the essence of god compressed into the womb and penis of the hermaphrodite mushroom.

Identifying the drug-producing plants, then, was not the only factor in early pharmaceutical and medical practice. It was one thing to be able to recognize a drug plant, even to know it's popular name; it was another to know how to extract and purify the active ingredient, and, above all, to know the right dosage. There were other complications. Some drugs were so powerful that they could only be safely administered on certain days, or after lengthy preparation of the body and mind. It was also well known that over-powerful drugs had to be countered with another having the opposite effect, as in the case of the purge Hellebore, and with some narcotics which had to be offset with stimulants. To know the correct dosages in these cases required an appreciation of the susceptibility of the patient to the drug's effects, perhaps the most difficult calculation of all. Much depended on the recipient's 'fate' allotted him at his birth, the factor that determined his individuality, his physical stature, the colour of his eyes, and so on. Only the astrologer could tell this, so that the art of medicine was itself dependent for success on astrology and the considerable astronomical knowledge this presupposed.

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

[Mary Gordon] was the daughter of a doting father who treated her to lavish displays of affection. So central is the father's love to he child's sense of her own identity that his early death when she is seven creates a profound sense of lack, of want, that Gordon in her forties - successful novelist, happily married, with a child of her own - is still trying to fill. [Paul] Auster could be speaking for Gordon when he observes, wisely, 'You do not stop hungering for your father's love, even after you are grown up' (19)^1. Now, in midlife, however, when Gordon sets out to recover her father and his story, she discovers that she wasn't the central figure in his life. Archival research in Washington, in Providence, and in Lorain, Ohio, turns in a painful process of disconfirmation in which everything she thought she knew about her father turns out to have been a lie: reinventing himself (like Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby), David Gordon had edited his siblings, his working-class childhood, and an earlier marriage out of his story, passing himself off as a Harvard graduate, who had converted later on to Catholicism. The records disclose an unattractive stranger, a disreputable man-on-the-make, an Eastern European Jew who wrote for pornographic magazines in which he indulged in anti-Semetic jokes. Struggling to reconcile the idealized image of childhood memory with the stubborn truth of the biographical record, Gordon even attempts briefly to assume her father's identity in order to understand it, conjuring up the immigrant Jewish child's oppressive sense of being burdened with the 'wrong' identity to succeed in the American culture of his day. \r\n \r\nThe turning point in her quest comes when she concludes that 'David Gordon is a man I cannot know.' Refusing to be merely an episode in his story, she appropriates him for her own: 'The man I know is a man I gave birth to. His name is not David. ...It is My Father' (194).² Her act of possession is as total as she can make it. Not only does she 'give birth to' her father in this narrative, but she literally revises his death as well: in the final section of The Shadow Man Gordon has her father's body exhumed from its place in her mother's family's plot and reburied in Calvary, a cemetery of her own choosing. This is certainly extravagant stuff, as Gordon is certainly aware. ...Gordon and Auster conclude that the story of the proximate other is ultimately unknowable. For Gordon, moreover, it proves to be a story she would prefer not to know, for it can't be integrated into her own identity narrative.\r\n \r\n \r\n¹ /publication/70 \r\n² /publication/71

The psychologist John Shotter has worked out a much more searching answer to the enduring vitality of the myth of autonomy. In order to correct psychology's - and his own - one-sided preoccupation with inner states, Shotter proposes 'to repudiate the traditional 'Cartesian' starting-point for psychological research located in the 'I' of the individual, ...and to replace it by taking as basic not the inner subjectivity of the individual, but the practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137). \r\n \r\n'In my earlier views,' Shotter writes, 'I was clearly still in the thrall of classic 'text' of identity, possessive individualism' (147). Possessive individualism is C. B. Macpherson's term for the proto-capitalist model of identity proposed by Hobbes and Locke, which posits the individual as 'essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them' (quoted in Shotter 136). Stepping back, Shotter asks why he - why we all - continue to account 'for our experience of ourselves...in such an individualistic way [as Macpherson describes]: as if we all existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals already containing 'minds' or 'mentalities' wholly within ourselves, set over against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes' (136). We talk in this way, he answers, because we are disciplined to do so by 'social accountability': 'what we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves - and for it - to the others around us...And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate.' So pervasive is this discursive discipline that not only our talking but 'our understanding, and apparently our experience of ourselves, will be constrained also' (141).

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

302

Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action. But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? — Psalm 42

Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous system underlying them. We can see this clearly by studying the matter in those who have been profoundly deaf since birth or very early childhood. For even they can - somehow - experience auditory hallucinations. This is commonly seen in deaf schizophrenics. In one study, 16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication. One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, who was full of self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, claimed she heard accusations from God. Another, a fifty-year-old congenitally deaf woman, heard supernatural voices which proclaimed her to have occult powers.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

150

In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of his God -- which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said 'I' and then realized, 'I am all this world!' The first degree of such love is of servant to master: 'O Lord, you are the Master; I am thy servant. Command, and I shall obey!' This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world. The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such a love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gita between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Krishna. The next, or third, degree of love is that of parent for child, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one's heart the inward divine child of one's own awakened spiritual life -- in the sense of the mystic Meister Eckhart's words when he said to his congregation: 'It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.' And again: 'God's ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.' In Hinduism, it is in the popular worship of the naughty little 'butter thief,' Krishna the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated. And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, 'O Master, I do not find that I love God.' And he asked, 'Is there nothing, then, that you love?' To which she answered, 'My little nephew.' And he said to her, 'There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.' \r\n \r\nThe fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritual. In the words attributed to Jesus, 'The two shall be one flesh.' For the 'precious thing' then is no longer oneself, one's individual life, but the duad of each as both and the living of life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear there anything like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.) \r\n \r\nAnd so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one's place in the world, wealth, social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love's fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, 'O my Lord,' one can say, 'now reveal thyself!' and he will have to respond. \r\n \r\nThere is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands' beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss. \r\n \r\nThe underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships,

254

Essentially the same mythological motifs are to be found throughout the world. There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgments, and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order and its forces, in symbolic terms.

A neurotic might be defined, in this light, as one who has failed to come altogether across the critical threshold of his adult 'second birth.' Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice, and so on. He has continually to correct the spontaneity of his response patterns and, like a child, will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or to that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported. If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society itself must depend for its existence.

The Fourth Way

Author: P.D. Ouspensky

Publisher: Vintage (1971)

Things happen in human life according to three laws: 1. The law of accident, when an event happens without any connection with the line of events we observe. 2. The law of fate. Fate refers only to things with which man is born: parents, brothers, sisters, physical capacities, health and things like that. It also refers to birth and death. Sometimes things can happen in our life under the law of fate, and at times they are very important things, but this is very rare. 3. The law of will. Will has two meanings: our own will, or somebody else’s will. We cannot speak of our own will, since, as we are, we have none. As regards another person's will, for the purposes of classification, every intentional action of another person may be called the result of this person's will. In studying human life it becomes clear that these definitions are not sufficient. It becomes necessary to introduce between accident and fate the law of cause and effect which controls a certain part of events in man's life, for the difference between events controlled by accident in the strict sense of the word and events resulting from cause and effect becomes abundantly clear. From this point of view we see a considerable difference between people in ordinary life. There are people in whose life the important events are the result of accident. And there are other people in whose case the important events of their life are always the result of their previous actions, that is, depend on cause and effect. Further observation shows that the first type of people, that is people depending on accident, never come near school work, or if they do, they leave very soon, for one accident can bring them and another can just as easily lead them away. Only those people can come to the work whose life is controlled by the law of cause and effect, that is who have liberated themselves to a considerable extent from the law of accident or who were never entirely under this law

Q. What is meant by the law of accident? \r\n \r\nA. The life of man-machine, of man who cannot 'do', who has no will or choice, is controlled by accident, for things in ordinary life happen mechanically, accidentally; there is no reason in them. And just as man's external life is controlled by accidental external influences, so is his inner life also controlled by both internal and external influences which are equally accidental. You will understand that, if you realize what it means that man is asleep, that he cannot 'do', cannot remember himself; when you think of the constant unconscious flow of thoughts in man, of day-dreaming, of identifying and considering, of mental conversations that go on in him, of his constant deviation towards the line of least resistance. People think that accidents are rare, but in actual fact most things that happen to them are accidental. What does accident mean? It means a combination of circumstances which is not dependent on the will of the man himself nor the will of another person, nor on fate, as do, for instance, conditions of birth and upbringing, nor on the preceding actions of the man himself. An accident happens when two lines of events cross one another. Suppose a man stands under the roof of a house, sheltering from rain, and a brick falls and hits him on the head. This would be an accident. There are two separate lines of cause and effect. Take the line of the man's movements and the fact that he happened to stop under the roof of that particular house; every small thing in it had a cause, but the brick did not enter into this line of cause and effect. Suppose the brick was negligently set and the rain made it loose and at a certain moment it fell. There is nothing in the life of the man or the life of the brick to connect them. The two lines of cause and effect meet accidentally.

The Symposium

Author: Plato

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)

Following the birth of Aphrodite, the other gods were having a feast, including Resource, the son of Invention. When they'd had dinner, Poverty came to beg, as people do at feasts, and so she was by the gate. Resource was drunk with nectar (this was before wine was discovered), went into the garden of Zeus, and fell into drunken sleep. Poverty formed the plan of relieving her lack of resources by having a child by resource; she slept with him and became pregnant with love.\n\n 'Because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love's situation is like this. First of all, he's always poor; far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly supposed, he's tough, with hardened skin, without shoes or home. He always sleeps rough, on the ground, with no bed, lying in doorways and by roads in the open air; sharing his mother's nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father, he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things. He's brave, impetuous and intense; a formidable hunter, always weaving tricks; he desires knowledge and is resourceful in getting it; a lifelong lover of wisdom; clever at using magic, drugs, and sophistry.\n\n 'By nature he is neither immortal nor mortal. Sometimes on a single day he shoots into life, when he's successful, and then dies, and then (taking after his father) comes back to life again. The resources he obtains keep on draining away, so that Love is neither wholly without resources nor rich. He is also in between wisdom and ignorance. The position is this. None of the gods loves wisdom or has the desire to become wise - because they already are; nor does anyone else who is already wise love wisdom. Nor do the ignorant love wisdom or have the desire to become wise. The problem with the ignorant person is precisely that, despite not being good or intelligent, he regards himself as satisfactory. If someone doesn't thing he's in need of something, he can't desire what he doesn't think he needs.