People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
Not equal to Not metaphor Not standing for Not sign.
One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.
Very seldom will a person give up on himself. He continues to have hope because he knows he has the potential for change. He tries again — not just to exist, but to bring about those changes in himself that will make his life worth living. Yet people are very quick to give up on friends, and especially on their spouses, to declare them hopeless, and to either walk away or do nothing more than resign themselves to a bad situation.
. . . pure, deep blue. It’s the cosmic color, the color of heaven, the color of infinity. It is also the color of my eyes. And of my bedroom.
There’s no fooling. People are sheep. They’ll just do any fucking thing. Anything. I mean, the sum total of everything I believe is the sum total of everything I’ve read, seen. I’m not told how to do it, it’s just . . . something’s influenced me. James Joyce or Schopenhauer or my Aunt Minnie.
But everybody’s looking for the man on the white horse, everybody’s looking for the one who will tell the Truth. So you read Lao-Tzu, you read Konrad Lorenz, I don’t know who else, Melville, Kenneth Patchen, somebody you think is not a bullshitter. Somebody who has the eyes of a saint and the perceptions of a ghost.
They’re gonna tell us the way, they’re gonna show us. They never really do, and we run around being cheap imitations of all those influences.
Even monkeys fall out of trees.
When you talk about Jung’s ideas, it’s important never to say the phrase “collective unconscious.” That’s his phrase. You must make up one for the same experience. Call it “the great lake.” If you’re an earth type, call it “the granite magma layer.” If you’re an air type, call it “the beehive of thoughts.” Ask your own psyche to rise, and slowly eat the phrase, and change it as it wishes. The problem of your own originality will then arise. If instead of “collective unconscious,” you say “beehive of thoughts,” you’ll notice that the concept you’ve expressed is already different from the concept “the collective unconscious.” Then you are responsible for that difference. You’d better be ready to defend it.
If we all did that, we’d see less of the goo that we constantly see in spiritual magazines. The word “bliss” appears again and again. “Bliss” means absolutely nothing. I have never met an American who felt “bliss.” The whole movement is penetrated by catch phrases . . . The political movement of the sixties died because people accepted the language without changing it. The Marxists accepted Marx’s language, the students accepted hippie language, the love generation accepted jazz musician’s language . . . Language is important. . . . If, as in the English department, the language is all received knowledge that the psyche has not absorbed and interpenetrated, then the language is dead. . . .
You have to go beyond words and conceptualized ideas and just get into what you are, deeper and deeper. The first glimpse is not quite enough; you have to examine the details without judging, without using words and concepts. Opening to oneself fully is opening to the world.
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.
Truth is error burned up.
That’s the way it is. . . .
