A living myth

The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish –  Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.

Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.

He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.

The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.

Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul

Two natured beings

Paraphrasing the words of Goethe’s Faust, “two selves dwell within our breast.”

One part of us is meant to live and function in the world we see around us — to eat, sleep, and produce our children, to answer the challenges of the natural and social world: in the words of Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, to be born and die, to kill and to heal, to build and destroy, to weep and to laugh, get and lose, keep and cast away. This is human life “under the sun,” the world that we see and know and call real.

But God, the “something,” is above the sun, above all that our eyes can see and our mind can name, and there is a higher part of ourselves that senses that and calls to us.

We are two-natured beings. Such is the ancient teaching.

Jacob Needleman, 1934 – 2022, American Philosopher, Money and the Meaning of Life

More and more stuff

If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff.

Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless overborrowing. The more we borrow, the more we lose. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviours of our species.

Thich Nhat Hanh

an inside job

We either make ourselves happy or miserable.

The amount of work is the same

Carlos Castaneda

Sunday Quote: Wasting this moment

You are fooled by your mind

into believing that there is tomorrow,

so you may waste today

Ishin Yoshimoto, 1916 – 1988) Japanese Buddhist priest, founder of the Naikan meditation method

I can be happy

I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude, and not on external circumstances.

and that I can live happily in the present moment

simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy

Thich Nhat Hanh