Like Burroughs, Spinoza shows that, far from being an aberrant condition, addiction is the standard state for human beings, who are habitually enslaved into reactive and repetitive behaviors by frozen images of themselves and the world. Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the 'sad passions' that intoxicate and entrance us.

• gurdjieff
• the fourth way
• being
• addiction
• habit
• behavior
• action
• passion
• spinoza
• awakening
• identification
• buffers
• though
• sleep

Psychoanalysts have been preoccupied since the turn of the century with the experiences of childhood; but, strangely enough, it is only since “just yesterday” that we are able to put together a fairly complete and plausible commonsensical picture of why childhood is such a crucial period for man. We owe this picture to many people, including especially the neglected Rank, but it is Norman O. Brown who has summed it up more pointedly and definitively than anyone else, I think. As he argued in his own reorientation of Freud, the Oedipus complex is not the narrowly sexual problem of lust and competitiveness that Freud made out in his early work. Rather, the Oedipus complex is the Oedipal project, a project that sums up the basic problem of the child’s life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himself—whether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not. As Brown put it: The Oedipal project is not, as Freud’s earlier formulations suggest, a natural love of the mother, but as his later writings recognize, a product of the conflict of ambivalence and an attempt to overcome that conflict by narcissistic inflation. The essence of the Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God—in Spinoza’s formula, causa sui… .

• psychology
• early childhood development
• rank
• freud
• neurosis
• oedipal project
• causa-sui
• fate
• control
• react vs respond
• conflict
• spinoza
• god
• love
• lust
• life
• work
• will
• destiny
• causa sui
• oedipus

To 'realize Buddha in this body' is to realize that you yourself are in fact the universe.  You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity.  Few dare admit this because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic Boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane.  But for Buddhists this is no problem because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation.  Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but rather an organism in which every part is a 'doing' of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or 'doing.'  Thus when things go wrong you have no one but yourself to blame.  You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.

• buddhism
• eastern thought
• god
• society
• spinoza
• western thought
• sin
• parents
• culture
• karma
• buddha
• eternity
• damnation
• body

As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This - which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name.

• god
• life
• spinoza
• self
• identity
• music
• energy
• other

You would immediately feel one with all nature, and with the universe itself, if you could understand that there is no 'you' as the hardcore thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings, and senser of sensations, and that because your body is something in the physical world, that world is not 'external' to you.  Thus when you listen, you do not hear anyone listening.  This has nothing to do with making an effort or not making an effort; it is simply a matter of intelligence.  To find this out seems to me almost more important than understanding that the world is round, that Africans are people, and that persons with opinions other than your own will not fry forever in hell.  Fully to understand that the universe is ourselves must put an end to the frantic panic about death and to our hostile exploitation of the planet Earth.

• all is one
• intelligence
• spinoza
• tolerance
• death
• nature
• will
• understanding
• hell
• body
• other
• matter

A flower goeswith a plant which goeswith a natural environment, and I see people as flowerings of their environments and not as separate objects...Thus if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field - moreover a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy, a field which would not only be flowering, but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming, and beeing.  A sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes, feel out into this entire pattern and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field.

• god
• spinoza
• energy
• environment
• physics

The more we know of particular things, the more we know of God.

• spinoza
• taoism
• zen
• god

For Spinoza, mental health is, in the last analysis, a manifestation of right living; mental illness, a symptom of the failure to live according to the requirements of human nature. \r\n \r\n>But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as 'illness' (Ethics, 4, prop. 44). \r\n \r\nIn this statement, so foreign to the thinking of our time, Spinoza considers passions that do not correspond to the needs of human nature as pathological; in fact, he goes so far as to call them a form of insanity.

• ambition
• fame
• greed
• humanity
• insanity
• mental health
• spinoza
• time
• nature
• money
• analysis

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering the moment we form a clear and precise picture of it.'\n\n (quoted from Spinoza's Ethics)

• suffering
• emotion
• spinoza