... “[T]he aim of the Hermetic treatises isn’t to argue their propositions. ‘Their meaning,’ Clement Salaman writes, ‘is the change they effect in the hearts of their readers or listeners in awakening them to the truth.’” ~ Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus.

“Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world ... and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out.” ... “This is revolutionary. It turns the world inside out.” ~ Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon.

“I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.” ~ Carl Jung, MDR.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness.” ~ CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

“The Renaissance could have marked the beginning of a new civilization based on a creative partnership between humanity and nature. But that was not to be. The Protestant Reformation of northern Europe was, in some ways, a reaction against the sensate spirit of the Renaissance ...” ~ David Fideler.

The Work ~~~~~~~ “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke. Image: The Queen of Hearts playing card. Follow the breadcrumbs . . . #Rilke #RainerMariaRilke #Work #GreatWork #Opus #MagnumOpus #Heart #Imprisonment

“We may think: Well, Steiner was a mystic, Blake & Coleridge were poets, Paracelsus was an alchemist. Weren’t they letting their own imagination run away with them? But we’ve seen that science and philosophy agree with them ...” ~ Gary Lachman, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination.

“Synchronicity is Jung’s coinage for what we can call ‘meaningful coincidence’, when the inner and outer worlds reflect each other with such accuracy and obvious meaning that to resort to mere coincidence as an explanation is useless ...” ~ Gary Lachman.

“But such is the first [half of] adulthood: full of blunders, shyness, inhibitions, mistaken assumptions, and always, the silent rolling of the tapes of childhood. If one had not set forth and made those mistakes and crashed into those walls ...” ~ James Hollis.

“As author and environmentalist Paul Hawken notes, today we have “resources”, but not “nature”; “human resources”, but not “people”; and we talk about “producing energy” rather than “extracting” it ...” ~ David Fideler, Restoring the Soul of the World.

The Root Causes of Why We're FUBAR or “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” ... esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/16/t... #PostTrust #PostTruth #Materialism #Disenchantment #Resist #Resistance #Underground #Survival #DarkAges

“In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us ...” ~ James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods. ~ Rudyard Kipling, “The Way through the Woods”. Image: Forest before the storm / Ivan Shishkin / WikiArt / Public domain.

We Asked Afghan Women What They Needed. The Answer Surprised Us | Scheherazade Foundation ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2oa...

Bateson's 'select and edit' raises a recursive question: who selects? If beliefs shape perception and perception shapes beliefs, the 'we' creating the world is itself created by that world. No editor outside the edit.

“Throughout their lives W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung sought out precedents for, and affinities with, their visionary — their daimonic — standpoints. Between them they uncovered and studied just about every major proponent of our tradition ...” ~ Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality.

“Suhrawardi wrote of an initiatic chain, a school of adepts reaching back into the dim past, and which included the fabled Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and others. All were informed by the same primal revelation ...” ~ Gary Lachman.

Ode Composed on a May Morning by William Wordsworth ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=omcY...

"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision — a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.”

“A Spell for Creation” A poem by Kathleen Raine. Video (1 min 33 sec) ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSx... #KathleenRaine #Poetry #SenseOfWonder

A Little Something for Your Ark ~~~~~~~ We have plenty of warners, but what we desperately need right now are more arks. “Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt”, a story of resistance: esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/15/a... #Free #eBook

“When we make contact with the unconscious, and so become privy to some of the collective secrets of the ages, we must compensate for this dialogue with the Gods by increased amounts of humour and humility: two of the best antidotes to spiritual arrogance and inflation.” ~ David Tacey.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze ... ~ William Wordsworth. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uv8...

Why did you flutter in vain hope, poor bird, Hard-pressed in your small cage of clay? 'Twas but a sweet, false echo that you heard, Caught only a feint of day ... ~ “The Cage”, Walter de la Mare.

They shut me up in Prose— As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet— Because they liked me “still” ... ~ Emily Dickinson, “They shut me up in Prose”.

“Marie-Louise von Franz says that “seldom, if ever, is nothing of what is projected present in the object. Jung speaks therefore of a 'hook' in the object on which one hangs a projection as one hangs a coat on a coat hook.” ~ Robin Robertson, Inner Voices.

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave ... ~ D. H. Lawrence, “Moonrise”.

JAMES HILLMAN: “Look, a great deal of our life is manic. I can watch thirty-four channels of TV, I can get on the fax and communicate with people anywhere, I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I’ve got call waiting, so I can take two calls at once ...”

A Little Something for Your Ark ~~~~~~~ We have plenty of warners, but what we desperately need right now are more arks. “Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt”, a story of resistance: esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/15/a... #Free #eBook

Wise, indeed, but pretty fucking annoying in practice!

“Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being ...” ~ David Whyte.

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul ... then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin.

A Free Man ~~~~~~~ “I am not a number, I am a free man!”, “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.” ~ No.6 in The Prisoner. Image: A screenshot from the cult TV series, The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan.

“An excellent question to ask ourselves is, “Who would I be without this story? This belief? This identity? This fear?” This question takes courage, because we have to look beyond the safety of the familiar.” ~ Ezra Bayda, The Authentic Life: Zen Wisdom for Living Free from Complacency and Fear.

“A.R. Orage, the literary critic and student of the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff, believed with [Bernard] Shaw that imagination is the propellant of evolution. ‘Evolution is altogether an imaginative process,’ he wrote. ‘You become what you have been led to imagine yourself to be’.” ~ Gary Lachman.

“Jung challenges us to consider that within each of us is a center that is wiser than our knowledge, deeper than our learning, older than our chronology, and more durable than our calcified convictions. From time to time, life humbles us, calls us to account ...” ~ James Hollis.

The Root Causes of Why We're FUBAR or “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” ... esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/16/t... #PostTrust #PostTruth #Materialism #Disenchantment #Resist #Resistance #Underground #Survival #DarkAges

“Where are the answers to the spiritual needs and troubles of a new epoch? And where the knowledge to deal with the psychological problems raised by the development of modern consciousness?” ~ Carl Jung, quoted in David Tacey, The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion.

“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters ...” ~ Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies, Collected Works, Volume 13.

“You find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply...” ~ James Hillman.

“In the course of my long lifetime, I have seen the meaning of the word ‘poetry’ change. At the beginning of this [20th] century the name of the poet was honoured with the corresponding expectation from the poets of what I would venture to call ‘food for the soul’ ...” ~ Kathleen Raine.

“In the end, what we fear will not go away, for it indicates what we must go through in order to awaken, become more genuine, and live more fully. The problem is that we tend to be most afraid of what our own souls require of us ...” ~ Michael Meade.

“Neoplatonism proposed the existence of deep interconnections among all things, including what is normally viewed as the distinction between mental & physical phenomena. From the everyday, ego-based state of awareness, mind & matter appear to be fundamentally different...” ~ Dean Radin, Real Magic.

Azada Women: Afghan Women Need Your Help — One Woman. One Hundred Dollars: Scheherazade Foundation. Video (2 min 24 sec) ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX79...

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps ... stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles ...” ~ Richard Tarnas.

The Root Causes of Why We're FUBAR or “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” ... esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/16/t... #PostTrust #PostTruth #Materialism #Disenchantment #Resist #Resistance #Underground #Survival #DarkAges

The American Transcendentalists: Video (53 min 51 sec). www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leoj... #Transcendentalists #Transcendentalism #Emerson #RalphWaldoEmerson #Thoreau #HenryDavidThoreau #Fuller #MargaretFuller #Idealism #Individualism #Intuition #Newness #Romanticism #Consumerism #Creativity

“There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension ...” ~ David Fideler.

“Christianity, unhappy as it is with ambiguity, divided and polarized the daimons into angels and devils. The act of polarizing made them literal beings, which daimons are not. They are real, and even, at times, physical – but, like soul itself, cannot be taken literally ...” ~ Patrick Harpur.

“The simple is in us. It is participation—participation in that which is unknown yet evident to us: a tiny seed in us ...” ~ Jean Gebser, quoted in Jeremy D. Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. #JeanGebser #Integral #Consciousness