Welcome To My Personal Journal. Articles On This Page Attempt To Lean Towards Cultural Relativism, Instrumentalism, Mysticism, Perennial, Universal, Eastern, Existential, Phenomenal, Gnostic, Illuminati, Rosicrucian, Freemason, Democratic, Liberal Civil Libertarian, Socialism, Secular Humanism & Pragmatic Views. From the mind of Richard Schwartz Sign Guestbook View Guestbook The articles I have here are some I personally found most outstanding among many others. The Gaean Conspiracy is based on the following major premise: The Earth is a single living being, whose rocks, plants, animals, air, oceans and oozing mantle are all interdependent systems in a giant biological superorganism. "In a word, God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him. It is in fact absurd and impossible to try to grasp God as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds." THOMAS MERTON "Imagination is an illusion of reality which can conceive us as an assembly of separate entities and selves. Meditation on interdependence helps penetrate reality in order to be "one" with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion and a system of concepts. THICH NHAT HANH "The Majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them, from the harsh threats of priests and kings to the soft voices of the hidden and not so hidden persuaders." ERICH FROMM "When God is regarded as exclusively immanent, legalism and external practices are abandoned and there is a concentration on the Inner Light. The dangers now are quietism and antinomianism, a partial modification of consciousness that is useless or even harmful, because it is not accompanied by the transformation of character which is the necessary prerequisite of a total, complete and spiritually fruitful transformation of consciousness." ALDOUS HUXLEY St. John of The Cross Dark Night of The Soul "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." CARL JUNG "All religions are therapies for the sorrow and disorders of the soul." "There is nothing either good or bad, but it is our thinking that's makes it so." SHAKESPEARE "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself." ERICH FROMM "Every science must be filled with the consciousness of its limits and the longing for a living experience of truth which is not reachable with speculative thinking." THOMAS MERTON "The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind, & it is therefore impossible ever to know that you are doing the right thing (since knowing is a function of consciousness. However, if your will is steadfastly to the good, and if you are willing to suffer fully when the good is ambiguous, your unconscious will always be one step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. In other words, you will do the right thing even though you will not have the consolation of knowing at the time that it is the right thing. M. SCOTT PECK Religion is based mainly upon fear. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in. BERTRAND RUSSELL "Throughout the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. What is the summum bonum of life? I think I have found that answer. I have discovered that the highest good is love. This is the principle at the center of the cosmos. It is the greatest unifying force of life. God is love. He who loves has discovered the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality." MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. "There is a moment in which the self- affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens - and it often happens in critical periods of history - the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety. But if he is not able to take this anxiety into his self-affirmation his anxiety turns into neurosis." (1952), The Courage To Be, pp. 69-70. -PAUL TILLICH "There is something nearer to us than Scriptures, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come." WILLIAM PENN    PLOTINUS   "All things are not in the process of becoming, but in Being and see themselves in each other. Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere. Each is there All, and All is each. Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. But when he ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world." PLOTINUS - 2nd Century "Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or pond." LEIBNIZ "If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism "One can believe that God is and live in his back, but he who trusts him lives in his face." (Two Types of Faith) "Trust is proving trust in the fullness of life in spite of the experienced course of the world." - MARTIN BUBER "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives what exists round about him - simply things, and beings as things; and what happens round about him - simply events, (I to I) . . Or on the other hand, man meets what exists and becomes as what is over against him, always simply a single being and each thing simply as being, (I to Thou) . . Only concerning it may you make yourself "understood" with others; it is ready, though attached to everyone in a different way, to be an object common to you all. But you cannot meet others in it. You cannot hold on to life without it, its reliability sustains you; but should you die in it, your grave would be in nothingness." "The essence of Christianity is not sterile doctrine, but the application of Biblical principles into a caring relationship with all those with whom we come in contact with on a daily basis." NORMAN VINCENT PEALE   "The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom.* "That which alone and first of all is decisive is not which ideas and which values are posited, but rather the fact that the real is interpreted according to 'ideas' at all, that the 'world' is weighed according to 'values' at all." MARTIN HEIDEGGER- "God Is A Concept, By Which We Measure Our Pain. . . The Dream Is Over" JOHN LENNON  "Religion is the intellectual resolution of the unknown" - R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER I love you, my brother, whoever you are. I love you as you pray in your mosque, as you practice your devotions in church, or worship in your temple.. For you and I are the children of one single religion: Faith." KAHLIL GIBRAN "Man tries to actualize all his potentialities; and his potentialities are inexhaustible. For he is the microcosm, in whom all cosmic forces are potentially present, and who participates in all spheres and strata of the universe. Through him the universe continues the creative process which first has produced him as the aim and the center of the creation. . . The bearer of this creative process is the individual who, as an individual, is a unique representative of the universe. Most important is the creative individual, the genius, in whom, as Kant later formulated it, the unconscious creativity of nature breaks into the consciousness of man. Men like Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schelling were inspired by the idea of a participation in the creative process of the universe. In these men enthusiasm and rationality were united. Their courage was both the courage to be as oneself and the courage to be as a part. The doctrine of the individual as the microcosmic participant in the creative process of the macrocosm presented them with the possibility of the synthesis." (1952), The Courage To Be, pp. 104-105. -PAUL TILLICH AL-ARABI Mystic & Islamic Sufi 1165-1240 C.E. "Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, you will fail to recognize the real of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, "Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah" (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance." "Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole." The whole reality of God is unknowable on the particular Word spoken in our own being in what Al-Arabi called "The Cloud of Blindness, " comparable with the 14th Century, unknown Christian Mystic who wrote, "The Cloud of Unknowing." ELIE WIESEL Holocaust Survivor & Noble Peace Prize Laureate "One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. the child who, Wiesel recalled had the face of a 'sad-eyed angel," was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: "Where is God? Where is He?" It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: :"Where is God now?" And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on the gallows." "People partition off their lands by means of boundaries, but no one can partition off the all-embracing sky overhead. The indivisible sky surrounds all and includes all. So people in ignorance say, 'My religion is the only one, my religion is the best.' But when a heart is illumined by true knowledge, it knows that above all these wars of sects and sectarians presides the one indivisible eternal, all-knowing bliss." RAMAKRISHNA ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER "No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. . . . This truth, is that a man can and must say: 'The world is my will.'" - , The World as Will and Representation, Vol I, pp. 3, 4   Welcome Human Conscious Implicate Order Aesop Fable Jurist Naturalist Enneagram - Types Principles over Codes Hyperspace/Conscious Creation/Mysticism Privatization Political Response The Mind and Rigpa Controlling Dreams Socrates & Immortality Elephant Truths Intuitive Awareness Thomasland On Darkness Allen Ginsberg The Great Encounter Mr. Religion/Theist Relative/Absolute Flesh of the Gods Stages of Faith Relativism & Fundamentalism Nietzsche Beyond Good & Evil Four Religious Factors Conceptions Towards The Higher Self Socrates To Nietzsche True Nature of Man Six Categories of Forbidden Knowledge Death & After Religion & God Discovering Magic Democracy & Greece Manzarek on The 60's Densmore to Morrison Leary-Mind and Head Vigyan Bhairav Tantra Christianity Head verses Heart Living by Principles Tacit Knowledge Courage To Be Goethe's NonNewtonian Heidegger's Nietzsche J.J. Van Der Leeuw Arthur Rimbaud Religious Experience Plato Notes Philosophical Irony Ignorance is Dangerous Historical Ignorance Four Directions Truth = Paradox Truth = Indirectly Prayer & Silence Hypothesis of God Purity of Heart Gems of Wisdom Who Is Christ For Us Universalist Christ Conscious Celestine Insights Sex,Violence & Bible Lou Holtz-Coach Freud - Religion SEARCH THIS SITE Gnostic Writings Manifest Destiny Contemplate Prayer Underlying Fact Non-Dual Mind Discover Magic Religious Formation Courage To Be Uncertainty Freedom Perennial Philosophy Study of Zen Apostle Paul Zen Notes Huston Smith-Zen Fear & Religion Mindfulness Dionysius Gaia Conspiracy One Faith - Blake God & Science Shambhala Mysticism Humanism Universalist Bonhoeffer Existentialism Krishnamurti Campbell - On God Dreaming Awake Humor Chart I Ching Greek - Hindu Epictetus Plotinus Chart of Opposing  Locke / Rosseau Peter Cooper History Old Watchtower Page "God's Word is the Word beyond the words of Scripture, beyond the formulations of tradition, beyond the human attempt to capture or to literalize. It is rather the Word, that by the grace of God, is perceived as Spirit beyond letter." JOHN SHELBY SPONG "I think the time has come for the Church to invite its people into a frightening journey into the mystery of God and to stop proclaim- ing that somehow the truth of God is still bound by either our literal scriptures or our literal creeds." JOHN SHELBY SPONG "We must ask where the inherent strength of religious doctrines lies and the circumstances that give rise to them, apart from all reason. Religious doctrines are not the residue of experience or the final result of reflection. They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes." -SIGMUND FREUD "By its very essence, the concept of Buddha-nature is not something that concerns Buddhists alone. We are concerned with an overall conception of what we could call the "double being" which each person has or is. One being is that part of our existence that we are all aware of. But that is not all. Each person also participates in an undivided absolute being, which is the basis of all that is." - HUGO ENOMIYA -LASSALLE "Every one-sided solution is doomed a priori to failure. It is not a solution but, even in the most favorable circumstances, only a post- ponement. For it is temporarily restricted and mental, regardless of whether it is focused on the merely measurable or the immeasur- able."- HUGO ENOMIYA -LASSALLE "Perfection consists not in knowledge but rather in the force with which we are seized." THOMAS AQUINAS "If you ould get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception." - JALAI-UDDEN RUMI "Self-discovery, self-knowledge, self-fulfillment is man's destiny. When we enter the world of ideals the differences among religions become negligible and the agreements striking. There is only one ideal for man, to make himself profoundly human, perfectly human. 'Be ye perfect.' The whole man, the complete man, is the ideal man, the divine man. 'You are complete in the godhead', said St. Paul. The seeking for our highest and inmost self is the seeking for God." - S. RADHAKRISHNAN "God is not someone who must be known according to analysis and reasoning. If we consider that the essence of reality is a personal thing, God is that which is most personal. Our knowing God is only possible through the intuition of love or faith. Therefore we who say we do not know God but only love Him and believe in Him are the ones who are most able to know God.". -NISHIDA KITARO "You will have to drop this idea of God that helps you to remain unafraid. You will have to pass through fear and accept it as a human reality. There is no need to escape from it. What is needed is to go deep into it, and the deeper you go into your fear the less you will find it is."  OSHO "When everything you carry around with you that you call a belief has become your own largely because of the experiences and testimonies of other people, it must be received with many question marks and doubts. As it comes to you from a source outside yourself, regardless of how persuasive the conditioning process might be, and of how many people just like you have worked to convince you of the truth of these beliefs, the fact that it is someone else's truth." - WAYNE W. DYER "There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is required." -"The self creates its own obscurity by placing itself between the I and the other, who are in reality an intersubjective oneness." GABRIEL MARCEL "Security is so seductive, and insecurity is so frightening. But security is always false, and insecurity is always real. No religion can make anyone secure, though it, like the drugs on which our society is so dependent, can give the illusion of security. True religion enables one to grasp life with the radical insecurity and to live it with courage. It does not aid us in the pretense that our insecurities have been taken away." JOHN SHELBY SPONG, A New Christianity For a New World, p. 68 "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reasons and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms- It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." ALBERT EINSTEIN (The World As I See It, trans. Alan Harris, New York, 1949, p.51)   "Man is not born to solve the problems of the Universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension." JOHANN VON GOETHE "The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self." ALBERT EINSTEIN "I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking." "One must have chaos in ones self in order to give birth to a dancing star." FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE  "We do not see things as THEY are, we see them as WE are." THE TALMUD   "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." RALPH WALDO EMERSON "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. . . . God is not an illusion, but a symbol pointing beyond itself to the realization of the mystery of at-one-ment." JOSEPH CAMPBELL   "Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountain- ous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individ- uationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomena." - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §63, p. 353 "Discover the silence within . . . live in the present moment . . . be happy where you are . . . develop your compassion . . . set aside quiet time everyday . . . search for a grain of truth in other opinions . . . stop blaming others . . . choose being kind over being right . . . get comfortable not knowing." RICHARD CARLSON, PH.D. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff - (The essence of Buddhism) "Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen." EPICTETUS 55-135 AD "Man is a distinct portion of the essence of God." The man who has learnt to regard things, not as literal with literal meanings, but as symbols, who sees not religion or religious organizations, but all persons, regardless of culture, race and religious beliefs, as temples of God and his actions those as divine, is a man who has learned constantly to remind himself who he is, where he stands in relation to the universe and its Ground of Being, how he should behave towards his fellow man and what he must do to come to his final end.   JACK KEROUAC   "I shambled after (others) as I 've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight prop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?," On the Road, pp. 5, 6 "My witness is the empty sky." "You can't have birth without existence and you can't have death without birth." "You'd be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday." "All things are like visions beyond the reach of the human mind." FRANCESCO PETRARCH Humanist 1304-74 C.E. "Theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God." Effective not because it proves anything but because it penetrates the heart." Anthology of Petrarch's Letters, David Thompson, p.90 Symbolism, mythology and poetry are non-literal expressions of essence beyond the rational mind. MULLA SADRA Islamic Persian Philosopher 1571-1640 C.E. "Everything to which man aspires, everything he desires is instantaneously present in him, or rather one should say: to picture his desire is itself to experience the real presence of its object. . . . There is no other source than the essential "I" of man himself, formed as it is by his intentions and projects, his innermost beliefs, his conduct. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Nancy Pearson, p. 166 PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN "We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super- consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955, p. 252)" "To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance- towards the 'other.' The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to 'egoism.' Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalizes itself." (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955. p. 263) “The politics of those whose goal is beyond time, beyond scripture, (beyond theism) are always those who reject the use of force; it is the idolaters of past and future, idolaters of words, concepts and scripture, of conservative memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.” - ALDOUS HUXLEY (Abridged) Escape From Fundamental Thinking "All the world is a stage, And all the men & women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7 139-143 "A fool thinks he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." Socrates "The first chapter of fools is to hold themselves wise." Shakespeare None of the roles we play are "absolute," but necessary for human survival. If only we can maintain our perspective of flexibility in each role we play. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism." - Sir William Osler, M.D.   RAM DASS   "The most familiar models of who we are - father and daughter, doctor and patient, helper and helped - often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another . . they are delusions of separateness. Our task is to free our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty . . " "How good it can feel to regain perspective. Our feeling of confinement as narrow, limited, isolated entities begins to dissolve as we take a few steps back and recognize that who we are is "this . . and also . . and also . . and also (multiple personas, roles, models). Moving in and out of these various identities, each is "real" only at the moment we are invested in it. A moment later it may not be relevant at all. We see, in other words, the relative reality of these various identities, "real" only in relation to the situation which calls them forth. But if all of our identities are only relatively real, coming and going as circumstance warrants, is there any par of us that remains steady and stable behind all our roles? If we observe our own minds at work, we see that behind all these identities is a state of awareness that incorporates them all and yet is still able to rest behind them. As we loosen the hold of each identity so that we don't get completely lost in it, we are able to remain light and loose - able to play among these various aspects of being without identifying exclusively with any. We don't have to be anybody in particular. We don't have to be "this" or "that." We are free simply to be. . . . We experience the versatility of our being and the independence of our awareness, opening up the windows of our little homes and letting in a little cross ventilation. . . Humor serves to support this awaking perspective." How Can I Help, pp 20, 31-32   THOMAS JEFFERSON   "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." - THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787 Now put that in your PATRIOT ACT, Mr. G.W. Bush . . . in The Domestic "Security Enhancement Act of 2003," in the . . .   PAUL BRUNTON   "The awareness of the relativity of things relieves the philosopher of any compulsion to identify his self with any particular viewpoint. His liberation from dogma enables him to take the viewpoint which best suits the circumstances. This does not at all mean that chaos will enter into this affairs, insincerity into his attitudes, and anarchy into his morals. He is safeguarded from such perils by the link he has established with the Overself's wisdom and immeasurable goodness." (The Overself: where man meets the infinite within himself) - Paul Brunton, Essential Readings, p. 193 The greatest truths are the best lies. There are no absolutes, Only human created formulas. We create the meanings & paradigms. It's not about relativism in chaos, or absolutism in attacking evil more, but about transcending the good-and-evil polarity, in the pragmatic ability to compartmentalize the absolutes and work towards unity. This is the difference between the lower psyche and the higher, the former clings on to absolutes and attacks relativism with vengence in conspiracies and slander under a particular morality code, while the later has the ability to live both in existentialism and beyond in an interdependence of integral, holistic unity. While orthodoxy rests in formulas and certainty, heresy or apostasy courageously ventures in freedom of choice and the ability to face uncertainty and yet maintain values. Balance rests in the middle ground between the Platonic world of absolute ideas and the empirical nature of Aristotle's science. "The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance - by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow."- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar Truth is characterized by it's relative nature, humor, inclusivity, paradox & the ability to contain contradictions. Falsity can be detected by it's absolutism, seriousness without humor, one-sidedness and the failure to integrate the whole.   WALT WHITMAN         JOHN KEATS   In Walt Whitman's poem, Song Of Myself, he writes, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." ALLEN GINSBERG   WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Allen Ginsberg in an 1988 interview, answers his one-sided interviewer's attack on Whitman with the following: Whitman is saying that our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about "negative capability." Keats said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind "without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason." Meaning that that portion of the mind which judges and irritably insists on either black or white is only a small part of the mind. T3he larger mind observes the contradiction and contains those contradictions. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking oneside or the other." - ALLEN GINSBERG, Spontaneous Minds, p. 485 The ability to contain contradictions does not have reside in blind relativism. It does not have to be the "doublethink" that George Orwell writes of in the authoritarian control in his novel, 1984, in which he describes as the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them both consciously and unconsiously. There can be the acceptance of contradictions while maintaining values, direction towards unity separating certain differences. There is a huge difference between the absolutes in pragmatism that compartmentalizes towards unity and that of mindless relativism.   CARL JUNG   Carl Jung, in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, A Chinese Book of Life, writes: "Intellect does in fact, harm the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, because spirit is something higher than intellect in that it includes not only the latter, but the feelings as well . . . It is the Chinese who have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity inherent in what is alive. The opposites always balance one another - a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. The reaction which is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, seems to me a mark of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the to narrow limits of a tyrannical intellect . . . I have learned that greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown, a psychic development . . . The union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will: it is a psychic process of development which expresses itself in symbols. pp. 85, 91-92, 98-99 - CARL JUNG   M SCOTT PECK   "Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole." - M. SCOTT PECK, A Different Drum The Greeks "Men are helpless so far as their fate is concerned but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly." The paradox of fatalism in accepting what the gods decide, yet with a fierce joy and autonomy to fully live this life towards excellence and the full human potential. Such excellence was the beauty of the self-artist in the desire to fully know oneself and restrain from excess. A passionate delight for life but not without the clear apprehension of its unalterable framework. The balance, that of a passionate tension, the tension between no romantic protest, and in contrast, no resigned acceptance, but with the courage to accept fate and yet craft life with zeal. Sometimes excellence resolves in suffering and death. Beauty, like glory, must be sought, through the price be tears and destruction, the choice of a short life in glory over a long life of mediocricy. - A few thoughts after reading Edith Hamilton's, The Greek Way and H.D.F. Kitto's, The Greeks. The Greek Polis & Democracy From H.D.F. Kitto's, The Greeks. "A man who takes no part in public business some call a quiet man: we Athenians call him useless. . . In fact, our polis is an education to all Greece." p. 123 "Everywhere the polis gave a certain fullness and meaning to life, where political democracy was carried to its logical extreme. There are of course those who deny that Athens was a democracy at all, since women, resident aliens and slaves had no voice in the conduct of affairs. If we define democracy as participation in the government by all the adult population of a country, then Athens was no democracy - not is any modern state: for because of its size every modern state must delegate government to representative and professional administrators, and this a form of oligarchy.If we define it as participation in the government by all citizens, then Athens was a democracy." p. 125 The Assembly met once a month, unless specially convened to settle something of importance. Any citizen could speak - if he could get the Assembly to listen; anybody could propose anything, within certain strict constitutional safeguards. p.125 "Public affairs in Athens were run, so far as possible, by amateurs. The professional was given as little scope as possible; indeed, the expert was usually a public slave. Every citizen was, in turn, a soldier, a legislator, a judge, an administrator." p.128 "To the Athenian at least, self-rule by discussion, self-discipline, personal responsibility, direct participation in the life of the polis at all points, these things were the breath of life." p. 128 "To attend to that business of the polis was not only a duty which a man owed to the polis: it was an absorbing interest too. It was part of the complete life. This is the reason why the Athenian never employed the professional administrator or judge if he could possibly help it. The polis was a kind of super-family, and family life means taking a direct part in family affairs and family counsels. The attitude to the polis explains, too, why the Greek never, as we say, "invented" representative government. Why should he "invent" something which most Greeks struggled to abolish, namely being governed by someone else." p. 129