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Individuation Quotes

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Individuation Quotes

“As we embark on this challenging yet transformational inner journey, we tap into the quantum self, the infinite potential that resides within. We come to realize that we’re not victims of circumstance, but conscious creators with the power to literally change the world ... or at least our world … by altering our worldview. Our own reclaimed beliefs—which are more like deep knowings based on direct personal experience instead of mimetic desire—are some of the primary tools that we employ as increasingly conscious architects of our own experience.”

“A critical piece of holistic self-becoming involves the deeply felt realization that our thoughts, beliefs and intentions aren’t merely mental or ‘just imaginary’ events. On the contrary, they’re potent forces interacting synergistically with the quantum field, the biofield of the Universal Mind, if you will. In a culture crafted by eager yes-men and -women to an overbearing materialism, this may be a hard pill to swallow. But that doesn’t change this clear (to many anyway) dynamic: the simply powerful act of observation influences the universe at its most basic level.”

“Always bear in mind that the only person whose judgement matters is yourself. If you can learn to transform self-judgment into good judgment, a.k.a. wise circumspection, you’ve clearly shaken off some of the Dragon’s spell and already have one foot halfway out the door of this construct.”

“As children we’re instructed to ‘live well’ and strive to ‘be the best we can be.’ But we’re rarely encouraged, in good faith, to contemplate—for ourselves—what living well and being our personal best actually mean for us … as individuals.”

“Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.”

“He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self. The analogous passion of Christ signifies God's suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine set up a relationship of complimentarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way to realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God's suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”

“We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation.”

“This is an archetypal motif: where the pearl is, there is also the dragon, and vice versa. They are never separate. Frequently, just after the first intuitive realization of the Self, the powers of desolation and darkness break in. A terrible slaughtering always takes place at the time of the birth of the hero, as for instance the killing of the innocents at Bethlehem when Christ was born. Some persecuting power starts at once to blot out the inner germ. Outwardly, it is often that the innermost kernel of the human being has an actually irritating effect upon outer surroundings. Realization of the Self when in statu nascendi, when only a hunch, makes a person unadapted and difficult for those around, for it disturbs the unconscious instinctive order. Jung often said that it is as if a flock of sheep resented it bitterly that one sheep wanted to walk by itself.”

“The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in "synchronistic" or "archetypal" events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear.”

“We create Hollywood and Disneyland to carry our projections of greatness. But as a society we are putting ourselves at risk in this process, for a celebrity may not be a true hero. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society. We have many celebrities but few true heroes these days. Modern Westerners have evolved psychologically to the point where we are placing our gold on living beings rather than dead bones, as was done in medieval times, but it remains to be seen whether we can learn to carry our own gold and find heaven within instead of without.”

“In truth we have been so preoccupied with the outer aspects of mythology that we have failed to realize that it is the inner, the subjective, dimension of mythology that is the potent healing place in each individual. The journey, once told, is what we take mythology to be. But the myth came forth spontaneously in a human being before it ever became a story told. And it came forth for the purposes of healing and growing that individual; it was a specific, unique, personal experience." . . . By developing an open and direct relationship with our deep imagination, we open ourselves to that wisdom that dwells in aliveness itself. The deep imagination carries within itself the potential of all experience. Not just the experience of this short lifetime that we take to be our own, individually, but the experience of that entire path that aliveness has traversed from the very beginning, from the origin of life itself." - Eligio Stephen Gallegos, PhD, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery”

“To think, to judge, to choose our values is to be individuated, to create a distinct, personal identity. But thus to affirm that I exist is to open myself to the realization that I am finite, that my life is limited, that I am mortal, that one day I will die. The rebellion against the inevitability of death results in a rebellion against the challenges and opportunities of life. If I refuse to fully live, I cannot die. So: fear of autonomy entails fear of self-responsibility entails fear of identity entails fear of aloneness entails fear of death. That which does not exist cannot perish.”

“To what end does one liberate one's country if afterward there is no meaningful goal in life, no goal for which it is worthwhile to be free? If a person no longer finds any meaning in their life, it makes no difference whether they waste away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if they can use their freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that they should be free. That is why finding the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else, and why the process of individuation must be given priority.”

“The “complete human being”—that is, the Son of Man—is at the heart of this new person born into the kingdom of God. Because personality is the ultimately valuable thing in creation, since it is life’s most unique expression, and because the kingdom is the goal of personality, the kingdom is futuristic and goal-centered.”

“The opposite sides of personality are so different that only a great force can draw them together in union. This power is love. Love is a stronger power than the forces of disunion. In love even the opposites can become one, and their differences unite in one indivisible whole.”

“The kingdom involves the realization of our personalities according to the inner plan established within us by God; hence, the unfolding of a Self that predates and transcends the ego.”

“We are the children of the earth. So, we play and dance with singular intelligence while we learn to discern between light and dark. And then, one day, if we play conscientiously, we might find ourselves in the library of all things where we are instructed by the sun, moon and stars to wake up and to be the marriage of light and dark – unity in shimmering silver – the mirror of the cosmos.”

“There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.”

“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing ... He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths ... There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law ... To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being ... he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.”

“Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.”

“It is, moreover, useless to cast furtive glances at the way someone else is developing, because each of us has a unique task of self-realization. Although many human problems are similar, they are never identical. All pine trees are very much alike (otherwise we should not recognize them as pines), yet none is exactly the same as another. Because of these factors of sameness and difference, it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of the process of self individuation. The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own.”

“When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, "Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can," then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.”

“So you put me through all this suffering just to taunt me?’ ‘Humans suffer because they take seriously that which we create for entertainment.’ ‘Oh really? Because let me tell you, I wasn’t the least bit entertained!’ ‘That’s because you were not being entertained, Mr Fantoccio, you were being enlightened,’ stated the Mistress through a pair of foggy eyes. ‘You want to know why painting never worked for you? Because painters are creators and you, Mr Fantoccio, are an overseer. You don’t care about setting up the puppet show; you are merely interested in giving it a good ending. For you, Mr Fantoccio, creating the world was never enough; you aspire to run it. With every breath, you want to shape it. With every choice, you need to control it.”

“We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.”

“From the spectacular point of view, the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and becoming.”

“Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.”

“Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.”

“Socialism, whether it's the 'soft tyranny' of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation, a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. 'Everybody in, nobody out!' is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism, no individuality, and ultimately, no individuation.”

“The 'coming of the Self' is immanent; and the process of collective 'individuation' is living itself out in human history. One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But it will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness. If a sufficient number of individuals can have the experience of the coming of the Self as an individual, inner experience, we may just possibly be spared the worst features of its external manifestation.”