The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our “emptiness” with children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core.
There are still songs to be sung on the otherside of humankind
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
You can only hope to find a lasting solution to a conflict if you have learned to see the other objectively, but, at the same time, to experience their difficulties subjectively.
Each of us must make our own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way.
There are no answers, only alternatives.
It is not healthy to be thinking all the time. Thinking is intended for acquiring knowledge or applying it. It is not essential living.
We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things going from one quick base to another, often with a frenzy that wears us out. We collect data, things, people, ideas, “profound experiences,” never penetrating any of them. . . . But there are other times. There are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper. Then we begin our “going down.”
And so, for the first time in my life perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deepest abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it comes — arising I know not from where — the current which I dare to call MY life.
New images of man do not spring from Policy Research reports. All cultures begin in explosions of myth in the minds of prophets, mystics, visionary scientists, artists and crazies.
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
I often think the Christian church suffers from a too ardent monotheism. In my house are many gods. With the boy, Jack Frost is ahead of Jesus, although we have never promoted Jack very hard. I see no harm in Jack and am not sure but what he ought to be taken into the church. He is a gifted spirit with an exciting technique and a rather gay program. And he is not terrible, like the Lord.
