Great Throughts Treasury

"Healing depends on listening with the inner ear - stopping the incessant blather, and listening."

"It is our fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present."

"Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms."

"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. Then the house of cards collapses."

"In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction."

"The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse."

"This is the point where love becomes possible. We see the other with the eye of the heart, an eye not clouded by fear manifesting as need, jealousy, possessiveness, or manipulation. With the unclouded eye of the heart, we can see the other as other. We can rejoice in the other, challenge the other, and embrace the other without losing our own center or taking anything away from the other. We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy. To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains, or agreements. Love exists in the moment-to-moment flux of life."

"Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams. The body has a wisdom of its own. However slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence and total support to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative, dammed energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in."

"A heart that can open so that when you meet another person or you?re talking to a group of farmers who are in despair because they can?t grow anything but grass and they?ve lost their beloved animals, they?ve lost their beloved fields, and they cannot figure out what to do ? what meaning does life have without love?"

"A flower won?t open if I yell at it and say Bloom!"

"Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction."

"Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium ? bombed out, an empty shell. [...] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?"

"Do you know whose colors these are? ... These are the colors of the whore of Babylon. Red and purple."

"Dismissing poetry is dismissing the glory of the imagination. Teaching English to adolescents for twenty years gives me the authority to say, "Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. Kill the metaphor and you kill desire; the image magnetizes the movement of the energy.I will make this clear as I speak. The tax money that is being withdrawn from arts programs in schools will be spent on prisons."

"Five years' training in Zurich at the C. G. Jung Institute, I said. Jung was a student of Freud until they quarreled."

"Ask yourself: As a child, who saw you? Who heard you? Was there anyone with whom you could be totally yourself and to whom you could trust your heart responses and speak your soul responses? Someone who made you think, "Gosh, I am somebody. They're happy that I'm here."

"Healing depends on listening with the inner ear ? stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering ? fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present."

"For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit."

"For years they have known they are in the presence of something stronger than they?a mystery that renders them powerless. Already constellated is a "god consciousness"?awesome and holy?that has nothing to do with the church or with groups. They know they have to engage in a different arena of reality. That arena is the psyche. By virtue of their temperament, training, consciousness, these women are blessed (or cursed) with an introspective nature, an exploring mind, an invincible curiosity about themselves which connects them to their own inner microscope. For better or for worse, they are convinced that the solution to their lives is in submission not to an externally imposed authority which they cannot understand, but to a truth that abides in themselves."

"Having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself."

"I can tell you that it takes great strength to surrender. You have to know that you are not going to collapse. Instead, you are going to open to a power that you don?t even know, and it is going to come to meet you. In the process of healing, this is one of the huge things that I have discovered. People recognized the energy coming to meet them. When they opened to another energy, a love, a divine love, came through to meet them. That is what is known as grace. We all sing about amazing grace. It is a gift. I think that it comes through the work that we do. For some people, it can come out of the blue, but I know that in my own situation, the grace came through incredible vigilance."

"Her [an anorexic's] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left."

"I felt his dismissal; I made no response."

"I love working with addicts, because I used to be one myself."

"I can't tell you the number of people?men and women?who have sat in my office sobbing, saying, "Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever had time to listen. So I am unlovable"?the saddest word in the language. Sometimes I've had a real flood of feeling about somebody, and I put out my hand and they say, "Don't touch me. I'm unlovable. And they mean it. As a child, that person was raised where the feminine was not present. You have to experience the feminine to understand it."

"If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are... An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior."

"I mean you can?t have people worshipping God ? and everybody saying they?re worshipping God ? with totally opposing ideas. The feminine principle would attempt to relate. Instead of breaking things off into parts, it would say, where are we alike? How can we connect? Where is the love? Can you listen to me? Can you really hear what I am saying? Can you see me? Do you care whether you see me or not? Now, these are very, very serious questions. Because the feminine is so difficult, ladies and gentlemen, to talk about the feminine because so few people have experienced it. What I?m talking about here is presence, and relatedness."

"I would like to just finish with Elliot?s Four Quartets about the rose and the fire. The rose is the soul we talked about earlier and the fire is the struggle to keep on the path. It is a struggle, yes. But once you?re on it, you wouldn?t be anywhere else. It?s the only way to go. And here is how Elliot puts it. "Here now, quick, now, always. A condition of complete simplicity. Costing not less than everything. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well. When the tongues of flames are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire. And the fire and the rose are one. " Then the suffering that we go through, the life that we live in the moment ? in the moment ? see that?s where the body lives. That?s where nature lives. That?s the feminine. Now. Here. That beating of the eternal and the personal. The fire and the rose are one. Thank you."

"I saw pictures on T.V. the other night of Indians in Bolivia raging angry with their pitchforks. They looked like the French revolutionaries going to storm the Bastille. And I couldn?t see what they were so angry about. And as they were marching, more and more joined them. And then they got to the capital, and what they were angry about is they were having to pay for their own water. Some trade law had been passed. They didn?t know anything about it. But they suddenly were asked to pay for their own water. How can you take the heart out of people? Just exactly that way. Don?t recognize them. And eventually?again let me just refer to something I saw on television. It showed the people in the concert hall ? the Russians who are in the theater the night of the Chechnyan rebellion when they came in. And it was a whole ? I don?t know how many of you saw it. It was simply horrific. No feeling at all. And the terrible moment was when they gave up. One of the men who spoke said if you could see some people died a few hours before their body actually fell over, but their heart went out of them. They couldn?t see any hope. And even before the gas was released in the theater, they died. So what I would like to focus on this morning is the loss of the feminine where the heart is no longer recognized. The individuality is no longer realized. The soul is not even thought about. And how that reverberates right through our culture."

"If we have not got time to hear the soul, to listen to its values, to allow it to touch in to the divine feminine that knows us before we were born, and to live that reality, despair sets in. And when despair sets in, there is an undermining of the culture. People turn to addictions in order to try not to live at all. They can?t deal with the agony of the reality of life. They get into the addiction. I?m going to talk really fast now. And great mother becomes food. As much food as you can put into your body because the hole is so big. And you cannot feed the body with a spiritual longing ? the spiritual longing that is involved in an addiction. It cannot be satiated with anything physical. The spiritual demands spiritual food. So the alcoholic wants spirit out of the whiskey bottle. The great mother, who we all long for, becomes food. Sweetness, cherishing. Anything to bring love into the body. And everything is concretized. Look at our culture in terms of concretization. Covering our planet with concrete cement. And hoping somehow that we?re going to be able to stay alive with that concretization. But to be able to take time ? also I remember when I was in India I had all the time in the world. But I got dysentery. You laugh; I tell you it?s a terrible disease. I couldn?t walk at all."

"I think that it comes through the work that we do. For some people, it can come out of the blue, but I know that in my own situation, the grace came through incredible vigilance."

"If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living."

"In the Seventies, people discussed the first two paradigms and tried to imagine what the next one would be like. Generally, they agreed that the new paradigm would be neither matriarchal nor patriarchal; it would be androgynous. Rather than tribal or hierachial, the structures of such a society would be ecological."

"It is amazing that our souls -- our eternal essences, with all their hopes an dreams and visions of an eternal world -- are contained within these temporal bodies."

"In T.S, Elliot?s Four Quartets, he talks about the rose of the soul. And if you?re following the Quartets he talks about the wandering of the soul and the flower ? the rose in Christianity is like the lotus in India. You know, the lotus comes up out of the roots, out of the water and opens the top of the water to consciousness. The rose has that symbol in Christianity. And as we?re working with our own souls, we open our rose petal by petal. And hopefully no petal is damaged. At the right time it opens and how ever fierce the fire that it finds itself in, if it?s given time and love, it opens. And gradually the whole flower becomes a totality. The reality of the rose is there. And it may be in fire, but it?s the fire that?s giving it its strength. The fire ? the suffering as we go through. We can?t avoid suffering, that?s simply part of life. But can we hold the reality of our own rose while we are going through that fire?"

"Moreover, perfectionist standards do not allow for failure. They do not even allow for life, and certainly not death."

"Most people in analysis are there because nobody had time to see them or hear them. They spent their time trying to please somebody else so, so they never found their own values. They never dared to live their own values. And they come to be adults, and you see them sort of trying to, you know, stand straight and walk strong. And all of a sudden it goes out and you say what happened? And they say the old voice came in. You know what the old voice said? What does it say in you? Who do you think you are? Or you?re too big for your britches. When all this airy-fairy flaky stuff is over you?ll come back to yourself. But the person has spent a lifetime trying to be who they are not. And what I?m talking about in the feminine is, 'Who am I?' And God knows that?s hard enough to find out. Where you can sit down with your journal or in a situation you think, if I stay about my integrity, what do I do here. God, you must know this so well in this country. If I stay with my integrity, what do I do here? Who am I? Do I know well enough to speak it? Where in my body ? see, the body is the feminine. Where in my body do I feel the integrity that allows me to come from that place and speak from that place? Do I feel the ripples in my resonators when I speak? I mean that. When I?m really speaking, I resonate, and I can feel it to my feet. And I know I?ve been telling my real truth there. You can know it. If you?re not coming from that reality, where are you coming from? And could you stand up if you were being faced with that? See, here is where I think the real power is. That you can relate to your body. That you can relate to your heart."

"Metaphorically, the body becomes a machine to be driven or a garbage dump to be avoided. At the same time, the magnificent Mother in whose womb we live is mindlessly poisoned and raped. Surely, our insane denial has to be perceived and acted upon."

"It takes great courage to break with one?s past history and stand alone."

"Now technology has made us one world. And we haven?t got the slightest idea what to do with it. We don?t know morally what to do. Ethically what to do. Politically impossible. And the dangers are becoming more and more terrifying. And what I?m suggesting to you in that dream of that woman coming in on that wave, it is the feminine principle that can bring a whole different thinking process to the patriarchy, as we have known it. Patriarchy thinking that way cannot work."

"Now, about that word authentic. It is related to the word author?and you can think of it as being the author of your own self. When you're living your own reality, you become the sovereign of your own life. You know who you are, you speak what you believe. There's a natural pride that goes with that: This is who I am?take me or leave me. Think of Michelle Obama?she is not afraid of her own strength. And since her strength takes nothing away from anyone else?because it is given with love?she is free to be her authentic self."

"Oh, yes, he said. Dreams and all that kind of thing."

"Once we get used to listening to our dreams, our whole body responds like a musical instrument."

"Ophelia is a little walking owl, bewitched by her unconscious feminine, her father, and what "they say. She never finds her own voice. She never finds her own body or her own feelings and therefore misses life and love in the here and now. Gradually the waters of the unconscious to which she is "native and induced swallow her."

"Rage and bitterness do not foster femininity. They harden the heart and make the body sick."

"Power in the sense of controlling somebody else is different from personal presence. That kind of power?patriarchal power?does not value other people. What I strive for instead is empowerment."

"She faces us with our greatest fear and by showing us the treasure hidden away within it, she takes us to a place where love is born. Love is the true antithesis of fear. It expands where fear constricts. It embraces where fear repels."

"Serious drinkers are like serious eaters or serious non-eaters. They are like serious drug-addicts. Their addiction holds a spell over them which acts as some powerful secret at the center of everything they do. The serious eater listens to others talking of diets, Weight Watchers, exercises; she hears them excitedly comparing pounds lost, pounds gained. She hears them encouraging each other, joking, consoling. She is not one of them. She knows the diets better than they do; she knows Weight Watchers is useless for her; she knows her life is on some Almighty Scale that she has to step on alone. She is in some covenant with food ? a covenant which she probably does not understand, but which nevertheless exerts some magical, compelling power over her. She hates it; she loves it; she keeps her covenant silent."

"That business of transformation, suffering happens at a cultural level as well as an individual level. I?m sure you all know individually how the suffering has brought you through to transcendence and to a whole new feeling about soul. At a cultural level a similar thing is going on. As we are losing community, if you think, for example, of the farmers ? I?m sure it?s true in the States as well as in Canada ? they cannot survive. An individual farmer has to look at the big farms coming in. And the big farms can put him out of business. The pig farm comes in and says look, you don?t want to raise ten pigs. Why don?t you just join us and have hundreds of little pigs. And when they get to be ten weeks old, there will be a truck that comes along and they will take them all along to the next person, who will have a different kind of barn, and he will raise them until they?re six months old. And then we?ll move them again. So the farmer never gets to know his pigs. The pig never sees the sunshine. We are creatures of the sun and we are being asked to eat food that never sees the sun? Chickens are in the same situation."

"Thank you, dear Sophia. From every cell in my broken body, my radiant body, I thank you. I am alive. I am free... to live... to die."