The Mind
People think freedom is the power to change what you dislike about the world around you.
You can quit a job you hate. Leave a person who hurts you. Switch cities for a change of scenery. Chop your hair for a new look.
What freedom actually is: the power to change what you dislike about yourself.
Julie Zhuo • The Looking Glass: Prioritize until it hurts
true freedom begins when we realize what the mind is not. Beneath the mind’s constant chatter and noise lies a profound stillness—a space untouched by its turbulence.
Troy Valencia • Living Beyond the Mind: The End of Personal Suffering
Jung once observed that each therapist must ask the question: What task is this person's neurosis helping him or her avoid?
James Hollis • Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
Jung, especially, developed a psychotherapy that was oriented toward soul. Unlike Freud, who viewed the unconscious as a boiling cauldron of evil impulses, Jung uncovered our lost creative impulses lying there, as well as the lost gods or mythological images that he called archetypes.
Steven Wolf • Romancing the Shadow
With his seminars on Kundalini Yoga in 1932, Jung commenced a comparative study of esoteric practices, focusing on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, Patanjali’s Yoga sutras, Buddhist meditational practices, and medieval alchemy, which he presented in an extensive series of lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).243
... See moreC. G. Jung • The Red Book
The Ego, Jung tells us, is that part of the psyche that we think of as "I." Our conscious intelligence. Our everyday brain that thinks, plans and runs the show of our day-to-day life. The Self, as Jung defined it, is a greater entity, which includes the Ego but also incorporates the Personal and Collective Unconscious. Dreams and intuitions come
... See moreSteven Pressfield • The War of Art
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.
To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.
And you do the same thing with joy. If you... See more
To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.
And you do the same thing with joy. If you... See more
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
Suppose you were looking at three objects—a flowerpot, a photograph, and a book—and were then asked, “Which of these objects is you?” You’d say, “None of them! I’m the one who’s looking at what you’re putting in front of me. It doesn’t matter what you put in front of me, it’s always going to be me looking at it.”