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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Part of the sluggishness and carelessness of everyday life ... is its failure to grasp its own experiences ..., its failure ... to recognize and take stock of itself ... the mind ... learns to repossess its experiences from the fog of habit, convention, and forgetfulness.
The resources of the lifeworld for meaning-making and identity creation have become almost as depleted as the resources of the natural world.
What is your life about, anyway?- Nothing but a struggle to be someone. Nothing but a running from your own silence.
For many men, work itself is often a pursuit of the spiritual, an expression of their spiritual life... There are political warriors, committing their lives to justice, whether social, ecological, racial, gender, and more. In fact, anyone who gives life their all ... is announcing his or her spirituality which is giving life one's all. Biophilia. Love of life. Lovers of life. Lovers. That is spirituality.
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.
The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspect suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found in the level of warm blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain – found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt in grope for out of some dark urge.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer or otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man’s metaphysical task - which he cannot accomplish without “mythologizing”. Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.
My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.
In practical terms this means that the existence of human beings will never be satisfactorily explained in terms of isolated instincts or purposive mechanisms such as hunger, power, sex, survival, perpetuation of the species, and so on. That is, man's main purpose is not to eat, drink, etc., but to be human. Above and beyond these drives, our inner psychic reality serves to manifest a living mystery that can be expressed only by a symbol, and for its expression the unconscious often chooses the powerful image of the Cosmic Man.
The danger to man's happiness and security now comes from man himself.
… the meaning of life is not exhaustively explained by one's business life, nor is the deep desire of the human heart answered by a bank account.
There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot."
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