British American author and lecturer (1915–1973)
For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?
I had a long talk with Jung back in 1958 and I was enormously impressed with a man who was obviously very great but, at the same time, with whom everybody could be completely at ease. There are so many great people, great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness with whom the ordinary individual feels rather embarrassed. He feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair and to feel immediately judged by this person’s wisdom or sanctity. Jung managed to have wisdom and I think also sanctity in such a way that when other people came into its presence they didn’t feel judged, they felt enhanced, encouraged and invited to share in a common life. And there was a sort of twinkle in Jung’s eye that gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else. There’s a nice German word - ‘hintergedanke’, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind. Jung had a hintergedanke in the back of his mind which showed, it showed in the twinkle in his eyes, it showed that he knew and recognized what i have sometimes called ‘the element of irreducible rascality’ in himself.
[A]s glaring and staring do not clarify the eyesight, and as straining to hear does not sharpen the ears, mental 'trying' does not enhance understanding. [...] On being told that this is wrong, the mind will even make efforts not to make efforts.
This can come to an end only when it is clearly seen that all these efforts are as futile as trying to leap into the air and fly, as struggling to sleep, or as forcing an erection of the sexual member. Everyone is familiar with the contradiction of trying to recollect a forgotten name, and though it happens again and again, we never seem to trust the memory to supply the information spontaneously. Yet this is one of the most common forms of what is known in Zen Buddhism as satori - the effortless, spontaneous and sudden dawning of a realization.
It is generally forgotten that our guarantees of religious freedom were designed to protect precisely those who were not members of established denominations, but rather such (then) screwball and subversive individuals as Quakers, Shakers, Levellers, and Anabaptists. There is little question that those who use cannabis or other psychedelics with religious intent are now members of a persecuted religion which appears to the rest of society as a grave menace to “mental health,” as distinct from the old-fashioned “immortal soul.” But it’s the same old story.
"God is the most obvious thing in the world. He is absolutely self-evident-the simplest, clearest and closest reality of life and consciousness. We are only unaware of him because we are too complicated, for our vision is darkened by the complexity of pride. We seek him beyond the horizon with our noses lifted high in the air, and fail to see that he lies at our very feet. We flatter ourselves in premeditating the long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him, the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale, and all the time are unaware of the truth that “God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves." We are like birds flying in quest of the air, or men with lighted candles searching through the darkness for fire. (p. 90)