If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
Good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realise how horrible it is,but seeing that this horrible is simply the foreground of a wonder:a mysterium tremendum.
“All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow-loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it. No one believes that there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.
That is not the necessary conclusion to draw. You could say, “I will participate in this life, I will join the army, I will go to war,” and so forth.
“I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful. wonderful opera-except that it hurts.”
Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions.I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way Santa Claus told me it ought to be. But affirming it the way it is that’s the hard thing, and that is what rituals are about. You can participate joyfully in a sarrowful world.
When people ask, “Do you believe in reincarnation,” I just have to say, “Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”
The metaphor in Christianity that corresponds to reincarnation is purgatory. If one dies with such a fixation on the things of this world that one’s spirit is not ready to behold the beatific vision, then one has to undergo a purgation, one has to be purged clean of one’s limitations. The limitations are what are called sins. Sin is simply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inappropriate condition.
In the Oriental metaphor, if you die in that condition, you come back again to have more experiences that will clarify, clarify, clarify, until you are released from these fixations. The reincarnation monad is the principal hero of Oriental myth. The monad puts on various personalities, life after life. Now the reincarnation idea is not that you and I as the personalities that we are will be reincarnated. The personality is what the monad throws off. Then the monad puts on another body, male or female, depending on what experiences are necessary for it to clear itself of this attachment to the field of time.
what does the idea of reincarnation suggest?
It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.
Now in every human being there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system…. We are taught to respond to certain signals positively, to others negatively or with fear; and most of these signals taught are not of the natural, but of some local social order. They are socially specific. Yet the im- pulses that they activate and control are of nature, biology, and instinct.
These are superior to the analytical talents of our mind.
Instincts are typical modes of action, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of action and reaction we are dealing with instinct, no matter whether it is associated with a conscious motive or not.
intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.eg.Suppose there are two different paths in the jungle,then an intuitive person gets a hunch that this route is safe.Intuition is a function by which you see round corners, which you really cannot do; yet the fellow will do it for you and you trust him. It is a function which normally you do not use if you live a regular life within four walls and do regular routine work. But if you are on the Stock Exchange or in Central Africa, you will use your hunches like anything. You cannot, for instance, calculate whether when you turn round a corner in the bush you will meet a rhinoceros or a tiger – but you get a hunch, and it will perhaps save your life… (pg. 14; Jung, 1968) Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.
We use the word “instinct” very frequently in ordinary . We speak of “instinctive actions,” meaning by that a mode of behaviour of which neither the motive nor the aim is fully conscious and which is prompted only by obscure inner necessity. This peculiarity has already been stressed by an older English writer, Thomas Reid, who says: “By instinct, I mean a natural impulse to certain actions, without having any end in view, without deliberation and without any conception of what we do.” Thus instinctive action is characterized by an unconsciousness of the psychological motive behind it, in contrast to the strictly conscious processes which are distinguished by the conscious continuity of their motives. Instinctive action sort of appears to be a more or less abrupt psychic occurrence, an interruption of the continuity of consciousness.
Accordingly, instinctive activity would have to be in-
cluded among the specifically unconscious processes, which are accessible to consciousness only through their results. But were we to rest content with this conception of in- stinct, we should soon discover its insufficiency: it merely marks off instinct from the conscious processes and char- acterizes it as unconscious. If, on the other hand, we survey the unconscious processes as a whole, we find it impossible to class them all as instinctive, even though no differentia- tion is made between them in ordinary speech. If you suddenly meet a snake and get a violent fright, you can legitimately call this impulse instinctive because it is no different from the instinctive fear of snakes in monkeys. It is just the uniformity of the phenomenon and the regularity of its recurrence which are the most characteristic qualities of instinctive action. As Lloyd Morgan aptly remarks, it would be as uninteresting to bet on an instinctive reaction as on the rising of the sun tomorrow. On the other hand, it may also happen that someone is regularly seized with fright whenever he meets a perfectly harmless hen. Al- though the mechanism of fright in this case is just as much an unconscious impulse as the instinct, we must neverthe- less distinguish between the two processes. In the former case the fear of snakes is a purposive process of general occurrence; the latter, when habitual, is a phobia and not an instinct, since it occurs only in isolation and is not a general peculiarity. There are many other unconscious compulsions of this kind-for instance, obsessive thoughts, musical obsessions, sudden ideas and moods, impulsive affects, depressions, anxiety states, etc. These phenomena are met with in normal as well as abnormal individuals. In so far as they occur only in isolation and are not repeated regularly they must be distinguished from instinctive processes,even though their psychological mechanism seems to correspond to that of an instinct.
