Hillman: ... Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth.
London: It's hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.
Hillman: Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:
You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy
What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You're really happy. Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.
[James Hillman]
with Scott London
Online interview, you can find it here.
Related posts:-
Process vs Outcome
Hear the Calling
I have come to be convinced that the parental fallacy itself has harnessed [a] Father's spirit to a false image, and his daimon turns demonic in kicking against the traces. He is trapped in a construct called fatherhood, a moral commandment to be the kind of good guy who likes Disneyland, and kids' food, gadgets, opinions, and wisecracks.
This bland mode betrays his necessary angel, that image of whatever else he carries in his heart, glimpsed from childhood into the present day ... The man who has lost his angel becomes demonic; and the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond.
And so his absences - physical, mental, spiritual - call him away from the cage of delusions that crush the angel's wings. Without inspiration, what's left is bare, aimless ferocity. Without the desire for an ideal, what's left is lustful fantasy and the seduction of free-floating images that find no anchor in actual projects.
Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed.
Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things, more infotainment, and an almost fanatic dedication of his mature male life to the kids so that they can grow up straight and straight up the consumer ladder in the pursuit of their happiness.
... the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also in providing happiness, along with shoes, schoolbooks, and van-packed vacations. Can the unhappy produce happiness?
Since happiness at its ancient source means eudaimonia, or a well-pleased daimon, only a daimon who is receiving its due can transmit a happy benefit to a child's soul. Yes, I am saying that "care of soul," as Thomas Moore has written, may thereby help the child's soul prosper.
Should the onus of soul-making in the parent shift to making the soul of the child, then the parent is dodging the lifelong task set by the acorn [their "calling"]. Then the child replaces the acorn. You feel your child is special, and you care for it as your calling, seeking to realize the acorn in your child. So your daimon complains because it is avoided, and your child complains because it has become an effigy of the parents' own calling.
Parents' deficient attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here.
Any father who has abandoned the small voice of his unique genius, turning it over to the small child he has fathered, cannot bear reminders of what he has neglected. He cannot tolerate the idealism that arises so naturally and spontaneously in the child, the romantic enthusiasms, the sense of fairness, the clear-eyed beauty, the attachment to little things, and the interest in big questions. All this becomes unbearable to a man who has forgotten his daimon.
[James Hillman]
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p.82, 83, 84, 85
Men became neurotic at the mid-point of life because, in some sense, they had been false to themselves, and had strayed too far from the path which Nature intended them to follow. By scrupulous attention to the inner voice of the psyche, which manifested itself in dreams, phantasies, and other derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could rediscover its proper path.
[in reference to middle-aged patients suffering from depression] Such patients are often people who, because of the demands of their careers and families, have neglected or abandoned pursuits and interests which, at an earlier point in time, gave life zest and meaning.
If the patient is encouraged to recall what made life meaningful to him in adolescence, he will begin to rediscover the neglected side of himself, and perhaps turn once again to music, or to painting, or to some other cultural or intellectual pursuit which once enthralled him, but which the pressure of life's business had made him abandon.
[Anthony Storr]
Solitude, p.191, 192, 194
[in reference to middle-aged patients suffering from depression] Such patients are often people who, because of the demands of their careers and families, have neglected or abandoned pursuits and interests which, at an earlier point in time, gave life zest and meaning.
If the patient is encouraged to recall what made life meaningful to him in adolescence, he will begin to rediscover the neglected side of himself, and perhaps turn once again to music, or to painting, or to some other cultural or intellectual pursuit which once enthralled him, but which the pressure of life's business had made him abandon.
[Anthony Storr]
Solitude, p.191, 192, 194
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life [...]
[...] Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them [...] Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.162, 307
[...] Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them [...] Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.
[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.162, 307
Jung thought that the cause of neurosis usually lay in the present [...] When the natural course of a man's development through life was held up, either by misfortune or by his failure to face life's obligations, his libido became turned in upon himself and reactivated the attitudes and feelings of childhood which would normally have been left behind him.
Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path.
Just as pain might make a man realize that there was something wrong with his body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware.
[Anthony Storr]
The Essential Jung, p.17
Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path.
Just as pain might make a man realize that there was something wrong with his body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware.
[Anthony Storr]
The Essential Jung, p.17
Related posts:-
Silence
Words - Silence
Solid - Liquid
Ordered - Random
Known - Unknown
Closed - Open
Control - Chaos
Nonverbal communication among Navajo Indians
* Nonverbal communication styles have different connotations within each tribe.
* Navajo Indians, for example, may be comfortable with long periods of silence, and may not share inner thoughts and feelings with anyone outside their clan.
* Interest in what an individual says is shown through attentive listening skills.
* To establish a positive social relationship, the rule of silence is considered a serious matter that calls for caution, careful judgment, and plenty of time (Chisolm, 1983, as cited in Purnell and Paulanka, 1998).
* A person may be considered immature if answers are given quickly, or if he/she interrupts another who is forming a response.
* It is important to allow time for elderly Navajo to respond to questions. Not allowing adequate time for information processing may result in an inaccurate response, or no response (Wilson, 1987, as cited in Purnell and Paulanka, 1998)
* Navajo Indian family members may show support to family members during doctor appointments not through talking, but by simply being present. For Navajo Indians, silence is being supportive.
Cultural Competency - Multicultural Health Generalizations By Culture
Lifted from here.
Trappist monks will generally only speak when necessary, and idle talk is strongly discouraged. As described by St. Benedict, speech disturbs a disciple's duty for quietude and receptivity, and may tempt one to exercise one's own will instead of the will of God.
Speech which leads to unkind amusement or laughter is seen as evil and is banned.
In years past, a Trappist Sign Language, distinct from other forms of monastic sign language, was developed to dissuade speaking. Meals are usually taken in contemplative silence, as members of the order are supposed to listen to a reading.
Wikipedia
Trappists
Our actual conversations are now modeled on telephone talk. No pauses, because if there is a moment of reflection, a moment of silence, you wonder if the other person is still there. Manic. Keep talking, like I'm doing now.
The culture expects one to be manic: hyperactive, spend and consume and waste, be very verbal, flow of ideas, don't stay too long with anything - the fear of being boring - and we lose the sense of sadness.
So the whole structure that you mentioned: aggressive, dominant, power, sadistic, we can also call manic. And that quality of the psyche is our ego development. It's so ego identified that we don't even see it as a syndrome! What we see as a syndrome is slowness, sadness, dryness, waiting. That we call depression, and we have a giant pharmaceutical industry to deal with it.
[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.13
Silence is a major value in Native American culture, for silence is the token of acceptance, the symbol of peace and serenity, and the outward expression of harmony between the human and natural worlds.
[Diane Long Hoeveler]
The Native person may talk to trees or rocks. Yet, as I understand it, this talking is something very different from our own notion of a conversation - which is our way of bridging the gap between persons.
For the Native there may be no original separation, no distance to be bridged by interaction.
[F. David Peat]
'I've Got a Map in My Head'
People committed to the silent way are highly integrated with the symbolic, for whole, unstated realms of culture act as extremely effective conveyors of information. Loyalties are concrete and people work together to settle their problems.
By screening the flow of information that comes into the community, and by developing a sensitivity to signs and symbols, the society expresses its traditions in life rather than in words or written records.
Since this kind of religious experience tends not to be communicated verbally, other forms of expression are sought. Those forms are human conduct.
Verbal discourse, or preoccupation with words, whether spoken or written, prevails amongst those who emphasize literacy, rationality, and individuality [...] Instead of collective unity there is a multiplicity of thought, which leads to individualistic revelations and knowledge.
[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 388, 390
Silence is a way of living and forgiving, a way of embracing the community with charity and the offender with affection. The member who confesses all before the church is forgiven, and the sin is never spoken of again.
Silence can aid in the restoration of good human relationships. By remaining silent when others would ask questions, one avoids the ugly subjects that would introduce disharmony.
In Amish life, silence is an active force, not a sign of introspection [...] The person who is possessed of silence (as distinguished form solitude) lives above verbal contradictions. The Amish are spared many of the arguments about words of Scripture or theology over which others haggle.
For them absolutes do not exist in words, whether in creeds or in position papers, for all such arguments are silenced by the character and example of Christ himself.
The Amish person who is content with moderation does not need to order everything consciously. Much is ordered without conscious knowledge, and in silence there is room to work out ambiguities. The Amish may have quick and ready insights without having to explain them in categories used by intellectually sophisticated people.
Silence is a resource that is always at one's disposal.
Amish sermons routinely stress scripture passages related to speech behaviour, especially from the Letter of James: "you must be slow to speak" (1:19) and "quietly accept the message planted in your hearts" (1:21). "The tongue ... represents ... the world with all its wickedness; it pollutes our whole being; it keeps the wheel of our existence red-hot, and its flames are fed by hell" (3:6). "It is intractable evil, charged with deadly venom" (3:8) (New English Bible).
Humility and quietness are the acceptable attitudes in the redemptive community. "Do not go babbling on like the heathen." [...] (Matt. 6:7) [...] Attributes of cleverness, longwindedness, eloquence in words, and wordiness belong to the proud and wicked.
[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 388-90
Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction.
Many primitive peoples, when they don’t have work to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get “bored,” i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.
[Ted Kaczynski]
Industrial Society and its Future, 147
In digital communication, nothing protrudes. Nothing deepens. It is not intensive but extensive, and this leads to an increase in communicative noise. Because we cannot remain silent, we must communicate.
Or: we cannot remain silent because we are subject to the compulsion of communication, the compulsion of production.
[…] What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity.
The fact that contemplative rest, silence, is essential to religion is suggested by the existence of the Sabbath […] during the Sabbath man rests 'his tongue from the everyday chit-chat and learns silence and listening'." The Sabbath demands silence; the mouth must be closed. Silent listening unites a people and creates a community without communication
Capital never rests. It is its nature that it must always work and continue moving. To the extent that they lose the capacity for contemplative rest, humans conform to capital. […] In this way, religion is diametrically opposed to capitalism.
Capitalism dislikes silence. Silence would be the degree zero of production and, in the post-industrial age, the degree zero of communication.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.37-8, 44, 46
The politeness-decorum system lays stress on not wasting words: this leads to an economy of speech that strikes outsiders as being conversation punctuated by silences.
To a Mescalero it is conversation punctuated by time for reflection, framing the next statement, being sure that the previous speaker is finished, and showing proper respect for language.
[Claire R. Farrer]
‘Singing for Life: The Mescalero Apache Girls’ Puberty Ceremony’, Betwixt and Between, p.260
Related posts:-
Everything and Nothing
Where language ends and art begins
Native Wellness
The Importance of Rituals
Growing down
Roots - Branches
Deflation - Inflation
Tethered - Free
Earth - Sky
Real - Ideal
Flawed - Perfect
Plato's tale of descent is the Myth of Er which I shall condense from the last chapter of his Republic:
The souls are all hanging around in a mythical world, having arrived there from previous lives, and each has a lot to fulfill. This lot is also called a portion of fate (Moira) that is somehow representative of the character of that particular soul.
For instance, the myth says the soul of Ajax, the intemperate and mighty warrior, chose the life of a lion, while Atalanta, the fleet young woman runner, chose the lot of an athlete, and another soul chose the lot of a skillful workman.
"When all the souls had chosen their lives according to their lots, they went before Lachesis [lachos = one's special lot or portion of fate]. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the genius [daimon] that had been chosen."
Lachesis leads the soul to the second of the three personifications of destiny, Klotho (klotho = to twist by spinning). "Under her hand and her turning of the spindle, the destiny of the chosen lot is ratified." (Given its particular twist?) "Then the genius [daimon] again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos [atropos = not to be turned, inflexible] to make the web of its destiny irreversible.
"And then without a backward glance the soul passes beneath the throne of Necessity," sometimes translated as the "lap" of Necessity.
The Platonic myth says the soul descends in four modes - via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival.
First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. ([Josephine] Baker told people she was sixty-four while she was still in her mid-fifties; she wore old clothes and gave up covering her baldness.)
Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches.
Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs.
Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.
[James Hillman]
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p.44, 45, 62
If
we began with Saturn, we would be far more reconciled with our givens,
including everything that doesn't work and is imagined to be a trauma, a
curse and bad luck, and we would be far less impatient about our
growth.
As I've grown older, I've come to realise that the curses, the frustrations, and the character faults visited on me by Saturn mean something completely different than what I thought when I was younger.
I took them literally as curses, and I cursed my stars for not giving me what I believed I needed and wanted. That is, I cursed Saturn, to use the old language.
But it isn't Saturn who curses us; we curse him. We make him into that poor, shunned, limping old God because we don't understand his mode of blessing. What a curse it must be to keep giving gifts that are received as punishments!
The faults and frustrations he visits on us are his way of keeping us true to our particular image. No way out.
The old lore attributed the last years of life to Saturn. That makes sense. Only now can I begin to reconcile myself with and not rebel against what I am and what I am not.
[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse
We remember the Baal Shem Tov, that genius of the spirit in the early eighteenth century in Poland, would not let his young men read certain spiritual texts until they were thirty-five.
The souls are all hanging around in a mythical world, having arrived there from previous lives, and each has a lot to fulfill. This lot is also called a portion of fate (Moira) that is somehow representative of the character of that particular soul.
For instance, the myth says the soul of Ajax, the intemperate and mighty warrior, chose the life of a lion, while Atalanta, the fleet young woman runner, chose the lot of an athlete, and another soul chose the lot of a skillful workman.
"When all the souls had chosen their lives according to their lots, they went before Lachesis [lachos = one's special lot or portion of fate]. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the genius [daimon] that had been chosen."
Lachesis leads the soul to the second of the three personifications of destiny, Klotho (klotho = to twist by spinning). "Under her hand and her turning of the spindle, the destiny of the chosen lot is ratified." (Given its particular twist?) "Then the genius [daimon] again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos [atropos = not to be turned, inflexible] to make the web of its destiny irreversible.
"And then without a backward glance the soul passes beneath the throne of Necessity," sometimes translated as the "lap" of Necessity.
The Platonic myth says the soul descends in four modes - via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival.
First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. ([Josephine] Baker told people she was sixty-four while she was still in her mid-fifties; she wore old clothes and gave up covering her baldness.)
Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs.
Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.
[James Hillman]
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, p.44, 45, 62
As I've grown older, I've come to realise that the curses, the frustrations, and the character faults visited on me by Saturn mean something completely different than what I thought when I was younger.
I took them literally as curses, and I cursed my stars for not giving me what I believed I needed and wanted. That is, I cursed Saturn, to use the old language.
But it isn't Saturn who curses us; we curse him. We make him into that poor, shunned, limping old God because we don't understand his mode of blessing. What a curse it must be to keep giving gifts that are received as punishments!
The faults and frustrations he visits on us are his way of keeping us true to our particular image. No way out.
The old lore attributed the last years of life to Saturn. That makes sense. Only now can I begin to reconcile myself with and not rebel against what I am and what I am not.
[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse
We remember the Baal Shem Tov, that genius of the spirit in the early eighteenth century in Poland, would not let his young men read certain spiritual texts until they were thirty-five.
Some say that the man's task in the first half of his life is to become bonded to matter: to learn a craft, become friends with wood, earth, wind, or fire.
[Robert Bly]
Iron John, p.60
By the expression asceticism, which I have already used so often, I understand in the narrower sense this deliberate
breaking of the will by refusing the agreeable and looking for the
disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen way of life of penance and
self-chastisement, for the constant mortification of the will.
[...] suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is also a second way of attaining to that denial.
Indeed, we may assume that most men can reach it only in this way, and that it is the suffering personally felt, not the suffering merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death.
For only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will, the knowledge namely that sees through the principium individuationis, first producing perfect goodness of disposition and universal love of mankind, and finally enabling them to recognize as their own all the sufferings of the world.
We always picture a very noble
character to ourselves as having a certain trace of silent sadness that
is anything but constant peevishness over daily annoyances [...] It is a
consciousness that has resulted from knowledge of the vanity of all
possessions and the suffering of all life, not merely one's own.
Such knowledge, however, may first of all be awakened by suffering personally experienced, especially by a single great suffering, just as a single wish incapable of fulfilment brought Petrarch to that resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he pursued had to vanish from his hands, in order to leave behind for him the immortal laurel instead of herself.
If the will is to a certain extent broken by such a great and irrevocable denial of fate, then practically nothing more is desired, and the character shows itself as mild, sad, noble, and resigned.
We
cannot help but regard every suffering, both those felt by ourselves
and those felt by others, as at least a possible advance towards virtue
and holiness, and pleasures and worldly satisfactions, on the other
hand, as a departure therefrom.
This goes so far that every man who undergoes great bodily or mental suffering, indeed everyone who performs a physical labour demanding the greatest exertion in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet does all this with patience and without grumbling, appears, when we consider him with close attention, somewhat like a sick man who applies a painful cure.
Willingly, and even with satisfaction, he endures the pain caused by the cure, since he knows that the more he suffers, the more is the substance of the disease destroyed; and thus the present pain is the measure of his cure.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.392, 395-7
Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.
[Adam Phillips]
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p.82
The way my people take care of something that we're not happy with is
to honor it and say, "Thank you, you've taught me a lesson." If it's
anger, if it's hate, if it's a drinking problem: "Boy, you've been with
me for a long time. Now I'm going to try something else. But I want to
thank you for teaching me something about myself."
Never try to just get rid of it. You can't, it's too strong, it's too embedded. Instead, honor it and say, "Thank you."
[Bear Heart]
The Wind is My Mother: The Life and Teaching of a Native American Shaman, p.113
Time To Leave (2005)
Becoming vulnerable, and 'giving in.'
His illness becomes a spiritual experience, his head-shaving a form of tonsure; a symbolic act signaling an inner shift.
In 'giving in' to a higher power, the ego is finally, mercifully, put in perspective. It has taken this illness to remind Romain that there are things bigger than he, things that are out of his control; but from his forced surrender he is able to discover a new way of relating to the world, one not so dominated by the self-aggrandising concerns of his ego.
His illness unites him with his vulnerability, allows him to "grow down" into the earth. He becomes a part of things, connected in a way that he wasn't previously; his ego in its place, no longer pulling at the leash.
From the position of surrender he is able to experience things anew; to smile, to listen, to look.
No doubt about it, the things that once had been natural and a relief, a jubilant cry to the birds in a tree, a marching song chanted aloud, swinging along the road in a light, rhythmical dance-step - these would not do any more.
They would have come out stiff and forced, would have been foolish and childish.
He felt that he was a man, young in feelings and youthful in strength, but no longer used to surrendering to the mood of the moment, no longer free, instead kept on his mettle, tied down and duty-bound [...]
As he engaged in this sudden self-analysis, he realised that he had incomprehensibly grown into the hierarchy, become part of its structure. His constraint came from the responsibility, from belonging to the higher collectivity.
This it was that made many young men old and many old men appear young, that held you, supported you, and at the same time deprived you of your freedom like the stake to which a sapling is tied. This is was that took away your innocence even while it demanded ever more limpid purity.
[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 179
Stefania, mother and woman, you’re 53, with a life in tatters, like the rest of us.
Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We’re all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don't you agree?
['Jep Gambardella']
Dialogue from 'The Great Beauty' ('La grande bellezza')
If you’re walking down the street judging everyone - “I don’t like that person’s skin colour … she’s not attractive, that guy’s fat, this person’s a loser, who put this in my way…” - the more you judge the more you’re going to separate yourself.
You’ll feel good for an instant - “I’m better than that” - but then you’ll feel lonely. You’re going to see negativity everywhere. The world reflects your own feelings back at you - reality is neutral, it has no judgements.
[Naval Ravikant]
‘Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant’
Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.
If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all "must," "ought to," "have to."
And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there.
[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 61
All stages in the acquisition of important ritual status seem to be accompanied by the novice undergoing an ordeal and pain, as a kind of payment.
This process makes ritual knowledge, as some Pintupi say, "dear." The right to make sacred objects follows on having fingernails pulled out and holes stabbed in one's palms and inside one's elbows. In this way, older men "give" knowledge.
An instructee, returns this prestation with pain, meat, and obedience, but he cannot offer the genuine equivalent of what he is given. He becomes more than he was, now having the right to make sacred objects himself.
Throughout the seclusion period, novices are expected to subordinate themselves to those who look after them. Talking, inattention, misbehavior, or insolence can result in beatings and threats of dire consequences.
Over time, the combination of discipline, physical ordeals (tooth evulsion, nose-piercing, circumcision, subincision, fire ordeals), and revelation of sacred knowledge produces marked changes in personality.
[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.174, 238
Once liberals might have favored working-class realism over the middle class conception of the body as a machine requiring "perpetual treatment." The authors, however, drew the opposite conclusion.
A stoic acceptance of bodily decline, they argued, reflected a "damaged self-image."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.463
Self-realization, so far as anyone ever achieves it, is manifested by the widest exercise of the individual's potentialities combined with the attainment of a mature relationship with others.
Subjectively, it seems to be attended by a sense of being fully adapted to, rather than attempting entirely to direct, the course of one's own development. This latter attitude is, in the wide sense in which Jung uses the word, religious: for it implies that the individual is acknowledging his ultimate dependence upon forces which may be depicted as either inside or outside himself, but which are nevertheless not of his making.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.174
Related posts:-
Everything is connected
Status Quo
Top Down / Bottom Up
[Robert Bly]
Iron John, p.60
[...] suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is also a second way of attaining to that denial.
Indeed, we may assume that most men can reach it only in this way, and that it is the suffering personally felt, not the suffering merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death.
For only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of the will, the knowledge namely that sees through the principium individuationis, first producing perfect goodness of disposition and universal love of mankind, and finally enabling them to recognize as their own all the sufferings of the world.
Such knowledge, however, may first of all be awakened by suffering personally experienced, especially by a single great suffering, just as a single wish incapable of fulfilment brought Petrarch to that resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works; for the Daphne he pursued had to vanish from his hands, in order to leave behind for him the immortal laurel instead of herself.
If the will is to a certain extent broken by such a great and irrevocable denial of fate, then practically nothing more is desired, and the character shows itself as mild, sad, noble, and resigned.
This goes so far that every man who undergoes great bodily or mental suffering, indeed everyone who performs a physical labour demanding the greatest exertion in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet does all this with patience and without grumbling, appears, when we consider him with close attention, somewhat like a sick man who applies a painful cure.
Willingly, and even with satisfaction, he endures the pain caused by the cure, since he knows that the more he suffers, the more is the substance of the disease destroyed; and thus the present pain is the measure of his cure.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.392, 395-7
Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.
[Adam Phillips]
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, p.82
Never try to just get rid of it. You can't, it's too strong, it's too embedded. Instead, honor it and say, "Thank you."
[Bear Heart]
The Wind is My Mother: The Life and Teaching of a Native American Shaman, p.113
Time To Leave (2005)
Becoming vulnerable, and 'giving in.'
His illness becomes a spiritual experience, his head-shaving a form of tonsure; a symbolic act signaling an inner shift.
In 'giving in' to a higher power, the ego is finally, mercifully, put in perspective. It has taken this illness to remind Romain that there are things bigger than he, things that are out of his control; but from his forced surrender he is able to discover a new way of relating to the world, one not so dominated by the self-aggrandising concerns of his ego.
His illness unites him with his vulnerability, allows him to "grow down" into the earth. He becomes a part of things, connected in a way that he wasn't previously; his ego in its place, no longer pulling at the leash.
From the position of surrender he is able to experience things anew; to smile, to listen, to look.
They would have come out stiff and forced, would have been foolish and childish.
He felt that he was a man, young in feelings and youthful in strength, but no longer used to surrendering to the mood of the moment, no longer free, instead kept on his mettle, tied down and duty-bound [...]
As he engaged in this sudden self-analysis, he realised that he had incomprehensibly grown into the hierarchy, become part of its structure. His constraint came from the responsibility, from belonging to the higher collectivity.
This it was that made many young men old and many old men appear young, that held you, supported you, and at the same time deprived you of your freedom like the stake to which a sapling is tied. This is was that took away your innocence even while it demanded ever more limpid purity.
[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 179
Stefania, mother and woman, you’re 53, with a life in tatters, like the rest of us.
Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We’re all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don't you agree?
['Jep Gambardella']
Dialogue from 'The Great Beauty' ('La grande bellezza')
If you’re walking down the street judging everyone - “I don’t like that person’s skin colour … she’s not attractive, that guy’s fat, this person’s a loser, who put this in my way…” - the more you judge the more you’re going to separate yourself.
You’ll feel good for an instant - “I’m better than that” - but then you’ll feel lonely. You’re going to see negativity everywhere. The world reflects your own feelings back at you - reality is neutral, it has no judgements.
[Naval Ravikant]
‘Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant’
Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.
If you are trying to live by ideals, you are constantly plagued by a sense of unreality. Somewhere you think there must be some joy; it can't be all "must," "ought to," "have to."
And when the crunch comes, you have to recognize the truth: you weren't there.
[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 61
All stages in the acquisition of important ritual status seem to be accompanied by the novice undergoing an ordeal and pain, as a kind of payment.
This process makes ritual knowledge, as some Pintupi say, "dear." The right to make sacred objects follows on having fingernails pulled out and holes stabbed in one's palms and inside one's elbows. In this way, older men "give" knowledge.
An instructee, returns this prestation with pain, meat, and obedience, but he cannot offer the genuine equivalent of what he is given. He becomes more than he was, now having the right to make sacred objects himself.
Throughout the seclusion period, novices are expected to subordinate themselves to those who look after them. Talking, inattention, misbehavior, or insolence can result in beatings and threats of dire consequences.
Over time, the combination of discipline, physical ordeals (tooth evulsion, nose-piercing, circumcision, subincision, fire ordeals), and revelation of sacred knowledge produces marked changes in personality.
[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.174, 238
Once liberals might have favored working-class realism over the middle class conception of the body as a machine requiring "perpetual treatment." The authors, however, drew the opposite conclusion.
A stoic acceptance of bodily decline, they argued, reflected a "damaged self-image."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.463
Self-realization, so far as anyone ever achieves it, is manifested by the widest exercise of the individual's potentialities combined with the attainment of a mature relationship with others.
Subjectively, it seems to be attended by a sense of being fully adapted to, rather than attempting entirely to direct, the course of one's own development. This latter attitude is, in the wide sense in which Jung uses the word, religious: for it implies that the individual is acknowledging his ultimate dependence upon forces which may be depicted as either inside or outside himself, but which are nevertheless not of his making.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.174
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