Premortal

"A forty-four-year-old social worker spoke in one of my midlife workshops about how as a child she experienced a peculiar sensation of 'homesickness.'  'I couldn't have been more than five years old,' she told the class.  'But I had this sense that I didn't belong to the people I was living with - my family, the house where I lived, the other kids in kindergarten.  I felt like I had come from another world.  I felt that somehow I'd been plunked down in the midst of these strangers as a test or trial.  The feeling was like being homesick, and was so real it frightened me."

Harry R. Moody
the Five Stages of the Soul

Liberty

No Prisoner there be -
Where Liberty -
Himself - abide with Thee -



Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 742

Escape!

"It was one of those days," a friend said, "when the only thing to do was read John Buchan."  I knew at once what was meant.  We all know days when the small irritations of life conspire to prevent one settling to anything.  There is work to be done but no motivation, arrangements to be made but no impulse.  Letters lie accusingly unanswered.  A vague sense of unease pervades one's being.  An inner voice tells one to snap out of it.  The will to alter one's mood is inexplicably absent.


There is a very English recipe for dealing with this condition - fresh air, physical exercise, direct contact with nature.  Getting out of oneself is the cure, particularly to hills, cliffs, high tops, where the turf is springy and the views stretch to the distant, blue horizons.  Oppressive days come, however, when such escapes may not offer.  City streets and crowds surround, unyielding pavements meet one's feet, horizons can only be imagined.  At such times, Buchan opens the door to the world one's being seeks - a world of thickets refreshed by a recent rain shower, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke rising lazily from a cottage chimney in the calm evening air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet - here is the key Buchan ingredient - tinged with the menace of man the enemy."


Sir John Keegan
Introduction
to John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps

Persistence

"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-axe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are levelled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that those, who have any intention of deviating from the beaten roads of life, and acquiring a reputation superior to names hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame, should add to their reason, and their spirit, the power of persisting in their purposes; acquire the art of sapping what they cannot batter, and the habit of vanquishing obstinate resistance by obstinate attacks."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 43

Jungian Analysis - II

"I made the statement earlier that the reasons a person gives for wanting to enter analysis are rarely the true reasons.  They are, without a doubt, the conscious reasons, and the would-be analysand is completely sincere in advancing them.  Whether he offers marital problems, or coming to terms with the death of a member of his family, or not being able to succeed in his work, or drinking too much, or sexual impotence, or a generalized feeling of anxiety - it all boils down to a truth which seems deceptively simple but in fact is complicated and all-encompassing.  It is that he has looked at himself and does not like the person he has become, and that he believes that somewhere in him is rising the possibility of being another sort of person, the one he was meant to be."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

Jungian Analysis

"Patients need to recognize why they have come to analysis: they have found themselves in a conflict situation that appears insoluble, and this discrepancy is between the conscious attitude they hold and unconscious factors which interfere with their carrying through on the intentions which correspond to their conscious attitudes."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

Revelation

"Where is the voice of God in our day?  Where has it been found in times past?


….Today we live in a world of material wealth and technological convenience, with little emphasis placed on God's revelation through inner experience such as dreams, images, and primary intuitions of spiritual truth."


Savary, Berne and Williams
Dreams and Spiritual Growth