“The ego’s relationship to the huge unconscious is like that of a tiny cork floating in the ocean. We often feel like that. We feel like a cork that is being tossed about in the ocean of life, completely at the mercy of the waves and storms that push and pull us. We seem to have little control or power over anything. The cork is nevertheless morally equal to the ocean, because it has the power of consciousness! Although the ego is small, it has this peculiar power of awareness that we call consciousness, and that special, concentrated power gives it a position that is as necessary, as strong, and as valuable as the seemingly infinite richness of the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 184)
“Philosophy is the essential, centering pursuit. It challenges us. It requires work and reflection and self-criticism. It requires that we hold ourselves to certain standards and that we hold ourselves to account when we fail to. It’s the real work, not the busy work. Philosophy is what birthed you, raised you, and continues to re-make you as life goes on. Don’t let some momentum in your other pursuits fool you into thinking you no longer need it. It’s home. Make sure you’re paying the proper respects. Make sure you’re going back often, so that today’s rhythm does not become tomorrow’s rut.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“For me, the seashore is a magical place that often appears in my dreams. When I don’t know how to start my Active Imagination, I frequently go to the seashore in my mind and start walking. Inevitably something happens or someone appears, and the imagination is launched. There have been a few days when I walked and walked, and almost nothing happened; sometimes you can grow weary walking. But generally, if you go to the inner place and search, you will find someone waiting for you.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 170)
“When a huge number of fantasies flood your mind, it often means that you haven’t been giving enough attention to the unconscious. It compensates your imbalance toward the outer world by flooding you with fantasy—which forces you into a kind of involuntary inner life.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 169)
“When you have a recurring fantasy that stays in your mind all day, it indicates that there is some inner problem that needs to be worked through.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 169)
”Circumstances are never going to give you what you need. You’re going to have to take them. No one is going to give you time to study philosophy, you have to take it. You have to make the time. Externals are never going to restore what is essentially an internal issue. You need that break now…and you must get it by stepping away, not literally but figuratively. Stop fooling yourself. Stop expecting someone or someplace to restore you. The only person who can only do it is you. And the right time for it is not later, but now.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“Everyone who begins this art [of Active Imagination] has a lot of preconceived ideas about who ought to be there and what these inner characters ought to say. People expect to hear immediately noble speeches by the Great Mother or profound wisdom from an inner guru. These things often happen, but just as often we find ourselves looking at the depression we have refused to face, the sense of loneliness, emptiness, or inferiority we’ve always run from.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 167)
“Even if a person is frivolous and deliberately tries to fabricate something, to conjure up something silly and stupid, to imagine a pure fiction, the material that comes up through the imagination still represents some hidden part of that individual. It can’t be made up from thin air. It has to come from somewhere inside the person who is producing the images.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 150)
“Any quality within you can be personified [through Active Imagination] and persuaded to clothe itself in an image so that you can interact with it. If you feel an inflation, you can go to your imagination and ask that inflation to personify itself through an image. If you vaguely feel a mood controlling you, you can do the same. It is the image that gives one a starting point. You can then enter into dialogue; you can interact; and you can move toward some kind of understanding.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 147)
“…These are among the most important times in one’s life–when one is alone. Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artists knows he must be alone to create; the writer to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
“You should not try to ‘dress up’ your imagination and make it sound proper, grammatical, or ‘refined.’ The object is to experience and record whatever flows out of your unconscious honestly in its raw, spontaneous form. You are not doing creative writing for other people’s eyes. This is a private matter between you and your own unconscious, between you and God, so let it be as rough, crude, incoherent, embarrassing, beautiful, or unregenerate as it may be when it comes spontaneously out of your unconscious. The results will be more honest—and more real.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 133)
“Whenever you want to cheer yourself, think of the qualities of your fellows—the energy of one, for example, the decency of another, the generosity of a third, some other merit in a fourth. There is nothing so cheering as the stamp of virtues manifest in the character of colleagues—and the greater the collective incidence, the better. So keep them ready to hand.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 125)
“What’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having more experiences left to consume.”
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
“The dream forced me to realize that the most important thing in life to me is friendship and feeling-exchange with other people. I don’t need to have many acquaintances, but I require good friendships that involve a deep level of communication, whether it be an exchange of ideas or the simple joy of being together.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 133)
“Continually review in your mind those whom a particular anger took to extremes, those who reached the greatest heights of glory or disaster or enmity or any other sort of fortune. Then stop and think: where is it all now? Smoke and ashes, a story told or even a story forgotten. Think how worthless all this striving is: how much wiser to use the material given to you to make yourself in all simplicity just, self-controlled, obedient to the gods. The pride that prides itself on freedom from pride is the hardest of all to bear.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 120)
“A Stoic is not a scold. Nor are they a tyrant. We are strict with ourselves, tolerant with others. Our discipline is our discipline, as it should be. Our own struggles should keep us busy enough that we shouldn’t even consider getting up in other people’s business to fix theirs. Instead let’s meet others where they are, accept and love them as they are. Because anything else is outside our control.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“One way to show status is by demonstrating how many resources you have. A bespoke suit, a huge graduation party, a fancy building… A bully who physically intimidates or an angry driver who cuts you off in traffic are each working to show their status and strength. But it’s also possible to demonstrate security and confidence by doing precisely the opposite. The billionaire in a t-shirt. The person who holds the door open and lets you go first in line… these are also demonstrations of status. The interesting question isn’t whether someone has status. It’s whether they’re gutsy enough to demonstrate it by making things better for others.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“It is not a good idea to try to make a ritual out of talking about your dream or trying to explain yourself to people. Talking tends to put the whole experience back on an abstract level. It gets contaminated with your desire to present yourself in the best light. Instead of a vivid, private experience, you wind up with an amorphous, collective chat. The best rituals are physical, solitary, and silent: These are the ones that register most deeply with the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 99)
“That in a short while you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that you now see and all who are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed, so that in succession different things can come to be.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 119)