Good quotes

for discussing science, relationships, religion or non-BK spirituality.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post11 Feb 2018

“Remain faithful to the earth, my Brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.

Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post15 Mar 2018

“Could God exist if nobody else did?

No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers.

If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. When Mrs. Mulligan and the Pope are thinking about God, it is not the same God.

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.

"The god you worship is the god you deserve.”

Excerpt From: Campbell, Joseph. “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.”

- Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011-08-01.
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ex-l

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Re: Good quotes

Post07 May 2018

“Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.

As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
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ex-l

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Re: Good quotes

Post08 May 2018

Membership in a religious organization doesn’t make one holy.

A sort of total humility, total surrender to the investigation of truth does.

- Jordan Peterson
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes - Secret Societies

Post21 May 2018

Carl Jung on Secret Societies and the members who fail to differentiate themselves [and why some people cannot leave the BKs].
The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organization to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognized that it is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet.

All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “-isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task.

Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth.

It would therefore be wrong to regard this intermediary stage as a trap; on the contrary, for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever threatened by anonymity.

Collective organization is still so essential today that many consider it, with some justification, to be the final goal; whereas to call for further steps along the road to autonomy appears like arrogance or hubris, fantasticality, or simply folly.

Like the initiate of a secret society who has broken free from the undifferentiated collectivity, the individual on his lonely path needs a secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims.

A great many individuals cannot bear this isolation. They are the neurotics, who necessarily play hide-and-seek with others as well as with themselves, without being able to take the game really seriously.

As a rule they end by surrendering their individual goal to their craving for collective conformity a procedure which all the opinions, beliefs, and ideals of their environment encourage.

~ Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 342. (Memoir)
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post27 May 2018

"To know a second language is to have a second soul."

- Charlemagne
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post01 Jun 2018

C G JUNG on the subject of wholeness, the god image and mandalas, including the point form

”Wholeness ... is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols.

Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him ( or her).

Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei*.

Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.

Experience shows that individual mandalas are symbols of order, and that they occur in patients principally during times of psychic disorientation or re-orientation.

As magic circles, they bind and subdue the lawless powers belonging to the world of darkness, and depict or create an order that transforms the chaos into a cosmos.

To the conscious mind the mandala appears at first as an unimpressive point or dot, and a great deal of hard and painstaking work as well as the integration of many projections are generally required before the full range of the symbol can be anything like completely understood.

If this insight were purely intellectual it could be achieved without much difficulty, for the world-wide pronouncements about the God within us and above us, about Christ and the corpus mysticum** the personal and suprapersonal atman, etc., are all formulations that can easily be mastered by the philosophic intellect.

This is the common source of the illusion that one is then in possession of the thing itself.

But actually one has acquired nothing more than its name, despite the age-old prejudice that the name magically represents the thing, and that it is sufficient to pronounce the name in order to posit the thing’s existence.


In the course of the millennia the reasoning mind has been given every opportunity to see through the futility of this conceit, though that has done nothing to prevent the intellectual mastery of a thing from being accepted at its face value.

It is precisely our experiences in psychology, which demonstrate as plainly as could be wished, that the intellectual “grasp” of a psychological fact produces no more than a concept of it, and that a concept is no more than a name, a flatus vocis***.

These intellectual counters can be bandied about easily enough. They pass lightly from hand to hand, for they have no weight or substance. They sound full but are hollow; and though purporting to designate a heavy task and obligation, they commit us to nothing.

The intellect is undeniably useful in its own field, but is a great cheat and illusionist outside of it whenever it tries to manipulate values.

~Carl Jung; Aion; Pages 31-32; Paras 59-60

* imago Dei - Latin, image of God
** corpus mysticum Latin- Literally, “mystical body”; one of the traditional epithets for the Christian Church, can be applied to any religious organisation.
*** flatus vocis - Latin, a mere name, word, or sound without a corresponding objective reality. Literally, nothing more than the breath of the voice.
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ex-l

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Re: Good quotes

Post02 Jun 2018

A delusion is a rigidly held belief
that is maintained even when there is
no evidence to support it.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post23 Jun 2018

I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged “possibility of transcendental existence” which nobody knows how to envisage.

We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life.

It is rich enough in marvels.

- C.G. Jung ~Letters Vol. II, Page 381

GuptaRati 6666

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Re: Good quotes

Post24 Jun 2018

Pink, Thank you. I agree with Jung. As I read his words. I was engulfed in a vision in which I saw with my mind's eye an image of myself under going transformation, but a transformation, which is incomplete. Were Jung still a mortal, I sometimes contemplate his intellectual reactions to the works of one of his most famous students: Jean Shinoda-Bolen.

About 20 plus years ago, I studied and was helped by two of her major classics; 'The Goddess In Everywoman' and 'The God in Everyman'.

It was the latter half of the 1990s, and I was rehabilitating my soul after stepping away from BKism, while I refined my skills as a medical scientist.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post24 Jul 2018

Is this an interesting insight into Dada Lekhraj’s psyche and our own responses to our experiences? I think so. Almost every line in this letter is a gem worth quoting for understanding the phenomenon that is religion, and the BKs. So, Panther thinks, why not post the lot!
To Bernhard Lang

Dear Colleague, June 1957

Many thanks for your friendly letter, which shows that the Buber-Jung controversy is a serious matter for you. And so indeed it is, for here that threshold which separates two epochs plays the principal role.

I mean by that threshold the theory of knowledge whose starting point is Kant.

On that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him. I will not enter here into [Kan’t] Critique of Pure Reason, but will try to make things clear to you from a different, more human standpoint. Let us take as an example the believing person who has Buber’s attitude to belief. He lives in the same world as me and appears to be a human being like me. But when I express doubts about the absolute validity of his statements, he expostulates that he is the happy possessor of a “receiver,” an organ by means of which he can know or tune in the Transcendent.

This information obliges me to reflect on myself and ask myself whether I also possess a like receiver which can make the Transcendent, i.e., something that transcends consciousness and is by definition unknowable, knowable. But I find in myself nothing of the sort. I find I am incapable of knowing the infinite and eternal or paradoxical; it is beyond my powers.

I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. He can know only the part but not the whole, not the infinite and eternal. So when the believer assures me that I do not possess the organ he possesses, he makes me aware of my humanity, of my limitation which he allegedly does not have.

He is the superior one, who regretfully points out my deformity or mutilation.


Therefore I speak of the beati possidentes (the blessing in ownership) of belief, and this is what I reproach them with: that they exalt themselves above our human stature and our human limitation and won’t admit to pluming themselves on a possession which distinguishes them from the ordinary mortal.

I start with the confession of not knowing and not being able to know; believers start with the assertion of knowing and being able to know.

There is now only one truth, and when we ask the believers what this truth is they give us a number of very different answers with regard to which the one sure thing is that each believer announces his own particular truth.

Instead of saying: To me personally it seems so, he says: It is so, thus putting everybody else automatically in the wrong.

Now in my estimation it would be more human, more decent, and altogether more appropriate if we carefully inquired beforehand what other people think and if we expressed ourselves less categorically. It would be more becoming to do this than to believe subjective opinions and to damn the opinions of others as fallacies.

If we do not do this, the inevitable consequence is that only my subjective opinion is valid, I alone possess the true receiver, and everyone else is deformed who lacks such an important organ as belief is considered to be. Buber is unconscious of the fact that when he says “God” he is expressing his subjective belief and imagining by “God” something other people could not sanction.

What, for instance, would a Buddhist say about Buber’s conception of God?

My human limitation does not permit me to assert that I know God, hence I cannot but regard all assertions about God as relative because subjectively conditioned - and this out of respect for my Brothers, whose other conceptions and beliefs have as much to justify them as mine. If I am a psychologist I shall try to take these differences seriously and to understand them. But under no circumstances shall I assume that if the other person doesn’t share my opinion it is due to a deformity or lack of an organ.

How could I have any communication at all with a person if I approached him with the absolutist claims of the believer?

Though I am sure of my subjective experience, I must impose on myself every conceivable restriction in interpreting it. I must guard against identifying with my subjective experience. I consider all such identifications as serious psychological mistakes indicative of total lack of criticism.

For what purpose am I endowed with a modicum of intelligence if I do not apply it in these decisive matters?

Instead of being delighted with the fact of my inner experience, I am then using it merely to exalt myself, through my subjective belief, above all those who do not accept my interpretation of the experience.

The experience itself is not in question, only the absolutizing interpretation of it.

If I have a vision of Christ, this is far from proving that it was Christ, as we know only too well from our
psychiatric practice. I therefore treat all confessions of faith with extreme reserve. I am ready at any time to confess to the inner experience but not to my metaphysical interpretation, otherwise I am implicitly laying claim to universal recognition. On the contrary, I must confess that I cannot interpret the inner experience in its metaphysical reality, since its essential core is of a transcendental nature and beyond my human grasp.

Naturally I am free to believe something about it, but that is my subjective prejudice which I don’t want to thrust
on other people, nor can I ever prove that it is universally valid. As a matter of fact we have every reason to suppose that it is not.

I am sorry to say that everything men assert about God is twaddle, for no man can know God. Knowing means seeing a thing in such a way that all can know it, and for me it means absolutely nothing if I profess a knowledge which I alone possess.

Such people are found in the lunatic asylum.

I therefore regard the proposition that belief is knowledge as absolutely misleading.

What has really happened to these people is that they have been overpowered by an inner experience.

They then make an interpretation which is as subjective as possible and believe it, instead of remaining true to the original experience.

Take as an example our national saint Nicholas von der Flue: he sees an overwhelmingly terrifying face
which he involuntarily interprets as God and then twiddles it around until it turns into the image of the Trinity, which still hangs today in the church at Sachseln. This image has nothing to do with the original experience, but represents the Summum Bonum and divine love, which are miles away from God’s Yahwistic terrors or the “wrath fire” of Boehme.

Actually after this vision Nicholas should have preached: “God is terrible.” But he believed his own interpretation instead of the immediate experience. This is a typical phenomenon of belief and one sees from it how such confessions of faith come about.

Because this so-called knowledge is illegitimate, inner uncertainty makes it fanatical and generates missionary zeal, so that through the concurrence of the multitude the subjective interpretation, precarious enough as it is, may not be shaken still further.

But the certitude of inner experience generates greater certainty than the interpretation we have imposed upon it.

Buber fails to see that when he says “My experience is God” he is interpreting it in such a way as to force everyone into believing his opinion-because he himself is uncertain; for confronted with the great mystery no mortal man can aver that he has given a reliable interpretation, otherwise it would no longer be a mystery.

It is only too plain to see that such people have no mysteries any more, like those Oxfordites who think they
can call up God on the telephone. Then you ask me if I am a believer I must answer “no.”

I am loyal to my inner experience and have pistis (faith) in the Pauline sense, but I do not presume to believe in my subjective interpretation, which would seem to me highly obnoxious when I consider my human Brothers. I “abhor” the belief that I or anybody else could be in possession of an absolute truth. As I have said, I regard this unseemliness as a psychological mistake, a hidden inflation.

If you have inner experiences you are always in danger of identifying with them and imagining that you are specially favoured, or are a special species of man who possesses one organ more than others.

I know only too well how difficult it is for people to stand off from their own experience far enough to see the difference between the authentic experience and what they have made of it.

For if they stood by it, they would reach very weighty conclusions which could severely shake their interpretation. Obviously they want to avoid these consequences, and my critical psychology is therefore a thorn in their flesh.

I can also confirm that I regard all declarations of faith, which Buber for instance has in mind, as an object of psychological research, since they are subjective human statements about actual experiences whose real nature cannot be fathomed by man in any case. These experiences contain a real mystery, but the statements made about them don’t. Thus it remained a real mystery to Brother Klaus what that terrifying countenance of God actually meant.

Incidentally, I would like to remark that the concept “transcendent” is relative. Transcendence is simply that which is unconscious to us, and it cannot be established whether this is permanently inaccessible or only at present. In the past many things were transcendent that are now the subject-matter of science. This should make one cautious-especially when dealing with ultimate things man cannot know about.

We cannot, after all, assert that belief enables us to attain godlike knowledge. We merely believe we can become godlike, but we must modestly accept the fact that we cannot thrust this belief on anybody else.

... All that I have written you is Kantian epistemology expressed in everyday psychological language.

I hope by this means to have gained your ear.

In case my idea of interpretation should seem unintelligible to you, I would like to add a few words more.

Interpretation by faith seeks to represent the experienced content of a vision, for instance, as the visible manifestation of a transcendental Being, and it invariably does so in terms of a traditional system and then asserts that this representation is the absolute truth.

Opposed to this is my view, which also interprets, in a sense.

It interprets by comparing all traditional assumptions and does not assert that Transcendence itself has been perceived; it insists only on the reality of the fact that an experience has taken place, and that this is exactly the form it took.

I compare this experience with all other experiences of the kind and conclude that a process is going on in the unconscious which expresses itself in various forms.

I am aware that this process is actually going on, but I do not know what its nature is, whether it is psychic, whether it comes from an angel or from God himself.

We must leave these questions open, and no belief will help us over the hurdle, for we do not know and can never know.

With collegial regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-379.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes - The Scientific Attitude.

Post06 Aug 2018

“What impressed me most was Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it should fail in certain tests. (...)

Here was an attitude utterly different from the dogmatic attitude of Marx, Freud, Adler, and even more so that of their followers. Einstein was looking for crucial experiments whose agreement with his predictions would by no means establish his theory; while a disagreement, as he was the first to stress, would show his theory to be untenable.

This, I felt, was the true scientific attitude. It was utterly different from the dogmatic attitude which constantly claimed to find 'verifications' for its favourite theories.

Thus, I arrived, by the end of 1919, at the conclusion that the scientific attitude was the critical attitude, which did not look for verifications but for crucial tests; tests which could refute the theory tested, though they could never establish it.”

- Karl Popper, 'Unended Quest'.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post02 Nov 2018

The Doctrine of Fallibility
“How can we admit that our knowledge is a human - an all too human - affair, without at the same time implying that it is all individual whim and arbitrariness?

Yet this problem had been seen and solved long ago; first, it appears, by Xenophanes, and then by Democritus, and by Socrates (the Socrates of the Apology rather than of the Meno). The solution lies in the realization that all of us may and often do err, singly and collectively, but that this very idea of error and human fallibility involves another one--the idea of objective truth: the standard which we may fall short of.

Thus the doctrine of fallibility should not be regarded as part of a pessimistic epistemology. This doctrine implies that we may seek for truth, for objective truth, though more often than not we may miss it by a wide margin.

And it implies that if we respect truth, we must search for it by persistently searching for our errors: by indefatigable rational criticism, and self-criticism.”

- Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations'
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Pink Panther

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Re: Good quotes

Post14 Mar 2019

What makes some of us vulnerable to spiritual gobbledegook?
The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question....

He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

R. D. Laing, Scottish psychiatrist
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ex-l

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Re: Good quotes

Post10 May 2019

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