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[nousrose]

In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life.

Owning Your Own Shadow

Robert A. Johnson

[nousrose]

Not to be attached to something is to be aware of its absolute value. Everything you do should be based on such an awareness, and not on material or self-centered ideas of value.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Shunryū Suzuki

[nousrose]

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness, an act of trust in the unknown.

The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Alan Watts

[nousrose]

Transcendent renunciation is developed by meditating on the preciousness of human life in terms of the ocean of evolutionary possibilities, the immediacy of death, the inexorability of evolutionary causality, and the sufferings of the ignorance-driven, involuntary life cycle. Renunciation automatically occurs when you come face-to-face with your real existential situation, and so develop a genuine sympathy for yourself, having given up pretending the prison of habitual emotions and confusions is just fine. Meditating on the teachings given on these themes in a systematic way enables you to generate quickly an ambition to gain full control of your body and mind in order at least to face death confidently, knowing you can navigate safely through the dangers of further journeys. Wasting time investing your life in purposes that you cannot take with you becomes ludicrous, and, when you radically shift your priorities, you feel a profound relief at unburdening yourself of a weight of worry over inconsequential things.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Padmasambhava

[nousrose]

Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right, is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

The Kybalion

The Three Initiates

[nousrose]

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

[nousrose]

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.

The Road Less Traveled

M. Scott Peck

[nousrose]

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[nousrose]

The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other. When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us. When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division. Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim. Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us. The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.

You Are Us

Gareth Gwyn

[nousrose]

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake

[nousrose]

We should return to the body in order to create spirit again; without body there is no spirit because spirit is a volatile substance of the body. The body is the alembic, the retort, in which materials are cooked, and out of that process develops the spirit, the effervescent thing that rises.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Carl Jung

[nousrose]

We can only escape from the world by outgrowing the world. Death may take man out of the world but only wisdom can take the world out of the man. As long as the human being is obsessed by worldliness, he will suffer from the karmic consequences of false allegiances. When however, worldliness is transmuted into spiritual integrity he is free, even though he still dwells physically among worldly things.

Horizon

Manly P. Hall

[nousrose]

The shaman's vision is a holistic vision where the distinction between the outer physical environment and the inner human being is blurred. In the shaman's mindscape there is no radical distinction between outer phenomena and inner noumena. Human consciousness encompasses the totality of possibility. This is a pre-rational mindstate. The development of consciousness that occurred in the western mind after the renaissance and the scientific enlightenment with the growth of rational, logical, thought processes, undermined this holistic vision of reality. As the conceptual capacity of the mind increased, so did our alienation from a sense of oneness with the environment. Outer phenomena became separate from us and became objects of alienated scientific observation. An acute separation, a dualism of self and other evolved. Rational consciousness, indeed, depends upon the suppression of the noumena of the holistic mind. The alienated dualistic mindstate of western man has grown like a cancer to the point where we can only gain access to vestiges of the holistic shamanistic vision by damaging the psyche and entering an atavistic stratum of consciousness that is conventionally labelled insane.

The Sacred Life of Tibet

Keith Dowman

[nousrose]

It is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep, into evil.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche

[nousrose]

A hundred things may be explained, a thousand told, but one thing only should you grasp. Know one thing and everything is freed. Remain within your inner nature, your awareness.

Counsels From My Heart

Dudjom Rinpoche

[nousrose]

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

[nousrose]

Self-actualizers are self-sufficient and self-contained. The determinants which govern them are now primarily inner ones, rather than social or environmental. They are the laws of their own inner nature, their potentialities and capacities, their talents, their latent resources, their creative impulses, their needs to know themselves and to become more and more integrated and unified, more and more aware of what they really are, of what they really want, of what their call or vocation or fate is to be.

Toward a Psychology of Being

Abraham Maslow