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Quote by Christos Yannaras

“To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.”

Quote by Christos Yannaras

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Variations on the Song of Songs

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Christos Yannaras

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“Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was—to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends—albeit more by circumstance than by choice—he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed—and thereby strained—by comprehensibility.”

“Beware of becoming too sure of your beliefs, because you run the risk of dissociation, or losing touch with parts of yourself. That is why the irrational and spontaneous are so precious to the Sufi. The 'irrational' circumnavigates the rational mind and by that allows the unconscious to manifest. The spontaneous and flexible person, who is not afraid of non-rational impulses, unorthodox behaviors, poetry, and dreams, in other words, the totality of being, acquires a unitive nature.”

“Beware of becoming too sure of your beliefs, because you run the risk of dissociation, or losing touch with parts of yourself. That is why the irrational and spontaneous are so precious to the student of spirituality. The 'irrational' circumnavigates the rational mind and by that allows the unconscious to manifest. The spontaneous and flexible person, who is not afraid of non-rational impulses, unorthodox behaviors, poetry, and dreams, in other words, the totality of being, acquires a unitive nature.”

“(Il est à noter que le propre des idées autosuggérées est d’exister en nous à notre insu et que nous ne pouvons savoir qu’elles y existent que par les effets qu’elles produisent.) - It should be noted that the characteristic of autosuggested ideas is to exist in us without our knowledge; and that we can only know that they exist there by the effects they produce.”

“Delve into the unconscious, to learn the codes inside the unconscious, to discover what are its views of reality. No amount of conscious desire for something can overcome an unconscious belief that if you had that thing, it would destroy you. Think of your father who implied that he would not accept a son who earned more money than he did. You might remember the time you had a nervous breakdown when your first love broke up with you. Or was it when you got into a schoolyard brawl and realized at some level that you wanted that kid dead, perhaps as you pummeled him into unconsciousness? Or perhaps what occurred was much more subtle during the early years of your adolescences, as you very deeply inside began to have sexual feelings for your sister and became disgusted with your body and sex in general. Gradually de-layer the unconscious beliefs that reside silently, but deadly, in your unconscious. In trying to help you to survive, the unconscious could be in fact destroying you. Recall again the diagram of the iceberg in this book; how meditating on it reveals that the world is, in reality, made up of almost seven billion unconscious minds interacting with one another.”