/tag/prohibition

3 quotes tagged 'prohibition'

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: kindle import (0)
100

Obviously, it takes discipline to make any radical change in one's own behavior patterns, and psychotherapy can drag on for years and years. But this is not my suggestion. Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive. Humor is the twinkle in the eye of a just judge, who knows that he is also the felon in the dock. How could he be sitting there in stately judgment, being addressed as 'Your Honor' or 'Mi Lud,' without those poor bastards being dragged before him day after day? It does not undermine his work and his function to recognize this. He plays the role of judge all the better for realizing that on the next turn of the Wheel of Fortune he may be the accused, and that if all the truth were known, he would be standing there now. If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.) Thus when the two poles, good and bad, forget their interdependence and try to obliterate each other, man becomes subhuman—the implacable crusader or the cold, sadistic thug. It is not for man to be either an angel or a devil, and the would-be angels should realize that, as their ambition succeeds, they evoke hordes of devils to keep the balance. This was the lesson of Prohibition, as of all other attempts to enforce purely angelic behavior, or to pluck out evil root and branch.


Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation
Author: Robin Robertson
Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)
112-113

As animals, we have natural urges...but we are taught that we can only satisfy those needs under conditions allowable by our parents (initially), then later by other authorities (teachers, ministers, scout leaders, coaches, etc.), still later by society itself in all its personified forms, and eventually only if those needs satisfy some abstract moral code that we carry inside us. \r\nThese psychic prohibitions create an inner conflict between the needs of society and the needs of our body. Because of that conflict, our body generates emotions that have no acceptable outlet. We conceal not only the initial urge - the lust, the hunger - but also the emotion generated within us by the conflict between the unfulfilled urge and the prohibition of morality: our anger, sadness, frustration. We turn those emotions inward upon ourselves. When the emotion needs to come out badly enough, we get mental illness as an attempt to resolve the impasse. \r\nIn a depth analysis, these conflicts emerge a little bit at a time, and hopefully are resolved. A patient discovers that his parents need no longer dominate his life; as an adult he can choose actions that satisfy his needs despite the fact that his parents punished him for those same actions as a child. He learns to develop a broadened morality that better fits his adult personality. \r\nBut there are many levels to the human psyche. After resolving the conflicts with parents and other external authority figures, much still remains; in fact, most still remains. Jung found that, stripped of the personal experiences which we all accumulate over the course of our development, there are deeper impersonal levels to the psyche. These levels are aspects of the collective unconscious.


Food of the Gods
Author: Terence McKenna
Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)
150

The strongest argument for the legalization of any drug is that society has been able to survive the legalization of alcohol. If we can tolerate the legal use of alcohol, what drug cannot be absorbed in the structure of society? We can almost see toleration of alcohol as the distinguishing feature of Western culture. This tolerance is related not only to a dominator approach to sexual politics but also to, for example, a reliance on sugar and red meat, which are complementary to an alcohol lifestyle. In spite of natural food fads and a rise in dietary awareness, the typical American adult diet continues to be one of sugar, meat, and alcohol. This 'burn out diet' is neither healthy nor ecologically sound; it promotes heart disease, abuse of the land, and toxic addiction and intoxication. It exemplifies, in short, every­thing that is wrong with us, everything that we have been left with as a result of an unhindered millennium of practicing the tenets of dominator culture. We have achieved the triumphs of the dominator style‑triumphs of high technology and scientific method‑largely through a suppression of the more untidy, emotional, and 'merely felt' aspects of our existence. Alcohol has always been there when we needed to call upon it to propel us further down this same path. Alcohol helps nerve a man for battle, helps nerve men and women for love, and keeps an authentic perspective on self and world forever at bay. It is unsettling to realize that the delicately maintained web of diplomatic agreements and treaties standing between us and nu­clear Armageddon was fabricated in the atmosphere of misguided sentimentality and blustering bravado that is typical of alcoholic personalities everywhere.