I once wrote that I thought the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others. This is what gives us a “self” and a superego. Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own. How could we?—I argued—since we feel ourselves in many ways guilty and beholden to others, a lesser creation of theirs, indebted to them for our very birth.

• flag
• authority
• meaning
• existentialism
• solipsism
• self
• ego
• duality
• good and evil
• guilt
• creation
• reason
• nature
• thought
• birth

The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness. The child gradually learns that his freedom as a unique being is dragged back by the body and its appendages which dicate “what” he is. For this reason sexuality is as much a problem for the adult as for the child: the physical solution to the problem of who we are and why we have emerged on this planet is no help—in fact, it is a terrible threat. It doesn’t tell the person what he is deep down inside, what kind of distinctive gift he is to work upon the world. This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt: guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person’s inner freedom, his “real self” that—through the act of sex—is being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role. Even worse, the inner self is not even being called into consideration at all; the body takes over completely for the total person, and this kind of guilt makes the inner self shrink and threaten to disappear.

• self
• thought
• freedom
• imagination
• symbols
• duality
• sexuality
• humanity
• existentialism
• psychology
• guilt
• sex
• reason
• work
• shadow
• body

There seems to be no alternative to accepting some sort of incomprehensible quality in existence. Take your pick. We all fluctuate delicately between a subjective and objective view of the world, and this quandary is central to human nature.

• flag
• existentialism
• duality
• subjectivity
• objectivity
• humanity
• struggle
• consciousness
• nature
• existence

Do not, for heaven’s sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering! A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul.

• soul
• duality
• suffering
• the fourth way
• heaven
• body

Two universes flowing in opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon depend five more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming infinite latticework based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.

• unity
• duality
• self
• energy
• gods
• other
• matter

When you shine the light, darkness disappears. We may understand this as a kind of fight between light and darkness, but in reality, it is an embrace. Mindfulness, if practiced continuously, will be strong enough to embrace your fear or anger and transform it. We need not chase away evil. We can embrace and transform it in a nonviolent, nondualistic way.'

• duality
• evil
• fear
• mindfulness
• self-remembering
• will
• reality
• light
• anger

Humanity as a whole and the single individual have the same task, namely, to realize themselves as a unity.  Both are cast forth into a reality, one half of which confronts them as nature and external world, while the other half approaches them as psyche and the unconscious, spirit and daemonic power.  Both must experience themselves as the center of this total reality.

• duality
• ego development
• humanity
• unconscious
• unity
• power
• nature
• experience
• reality
• spirit
• psyche
• other

The identification of the ego with consciousness robs it of contact with the unconscious and thus of psychic wholeness.  Consciousness can now claim to represent unity, but this unity is only the relative unity of the conscious mind and not that of the personality.  Psychic wholeness is lost and is replaced by the dualistic principle of opposites which governs all conscious and unconscious constellations.

• consciousness
• duality
• ego
• unity
• identification
• personality
• unconscious

The phenomenon of psychic duality plainly expressed in Egyptian ritual and formulated theologically thousands of years later in the famous dialogue between Nicodemus and Christ is still alive today in the not uncommon feeling that one is a 'child of God,' although a son or daughter of Mr. X.  The dual parentage evidently corresponds to some duality in human nature, here represented by the hero.

• the hero
• christ
• duality
• humanity
• god
• nature
• ritual

To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity: the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of itself. The experiencer and the experience become a single, ever-changing, self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its unfolding, and of infinite complexity and subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterens in the air, or of ink dropped in water, or of a dancing snake which seems to move from every part of its body at once. This is to say that all our actions and experiences arise mutually from the organism and from the environment at the same time.

• freedom
• ji-ji-mu-ge
• lsd
• duality
• time
• experience
• self
• environment
• body

Oh, we are spontaneous, we are good and evil in an astonishing blend, we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller and at the same time we go rampaging around the inns and tearing out the beards of the drunken sots, our boon companions. Oh, we too are good and beautiful, but only when we ourselves feel good and beautiful. Indeed, we are positively tempested - yes, tempested - by the most noble ideals, but only upon condition that they be attained of themselves, fall down upon our tables from the sky, and above all that they be gratis, gratis, so that nothing must be paid for them. Paying is something we dislike horribly, while on the other hand we love to receive, and this in everything. Oh, give us, give us every possible blessing of life (it must be every possible one, for more cheaply we will not be reconciled) and in particular do not hinder our disposition in any way, and then we too shall demonstrate that we are able to be good and beautiful.

• duality
• good and evil
• humanity
• life
• sin
• ideal
• love
• time
• will
• evil
• other
• fall