Nice quote from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha

"Slowly the thinker went on his way and asked himself: what is it that you wanted to learn from teachings and teachers, and although they taught you much, what was it they could not teach you? And he thought: It was the Self, the character and nature of which I wished to learn. I wanted to rid myself of the Self, to conquer it, but I could not conquer it, I could only deceive it, could only fly from it, could only hid from it. Truly, nothing in the world had occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everybody else, that I am Siddhartha; and about nothing in the world do I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha".

- Hermann Hesse 

Great quote on lay paths to the transcendent function from Abraham Maslow

"I wish to underscore one main paradox I have dealt with above which we must face even if we don't understand it. The goal of identity (self-actualization, autonomy, individuation, Horney's real self, authenticity, etc.) seems to be simultaneously an end-goal in itself, and also a transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself. Put the other way about, if our goal is the Eastern one of ego-transcendence and obliteration, of leaving behind self-consciousness and self-observation, of fusion with the world and identification with it... then it looks as if the best path to this goal for most people is via achieving identity, a strong real self, and via basic-need-gratitification rather than via asceticism."

- Abraham Maslow

So similar in tone to the messages in John Welwood and Robert Augustus Masters' on what they call spiritual bybassing, and evocative of my favourite Jack Engler quotes: "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" and "Ontological emptiness does not mean psychological emptiness" (the last one I quote to myself endlessly).

I'm doing a mountain of uni reading on Carl Rogers and Abe Maslow, and it's such solid stuff for our ego-psychology. There'll me a lot more of Rogers on the way I'm sure. He has a dignity and virtuous, respectful regard for people and their process like few others I've studied. His is genuinely heartwarming stuff.

Just brainfarting a little more here while I'm on a plane from Argentina to Sydney... It's interesting too to think of a quote from Nathaniel Branden about how he frames presence of the ego:

"We can talk about transcending a limited self-concept. We cannot talk—rationally—about transcending the self. We can talk about transcending an overrestricted concept of ego. We cannot talk—rationally—about transcending ego (not if we understand what ego really is and don't associate it with vanity or defensiveness)....Being present to what we are doing does not mean "being in the now" in a way that drops all connection to past and future. Living consciously entails being in the present without losing the wider context. The context is there as background, and what we are doing is foreground. Then we are in the moment but not trapped in the moment. This is the state that makes optimal action possible. I stress this point because injunctions like "be here now" are sometimes interpreted (or misinterpreted) to mean a shrinking of awareness to encompass only the immediate moment, with the rest of one's knowledge cast into oblivion and with no concern for the future consequences of one's acts. The ultimate absurdity of this understanding of "be here now" is captured in the cartoon showing a man falling from a skyscraper who remarks mid-flight, "So far, so good".

Funny too how he and one of my heroes Ken Wilber battled this one out, as so hilariously captured by Ken's late wife Treya in her journal notes published as Grace and Grit:

"Nathaniel and Ken had the same friendly argument they always have. I don't think either of them will ever give up! Nathaniel: "I think you are the clearest writer on mysticism around, and yet your whole position is self-contradictory. You say that mysticism is becoming one with the whole. But if I become one with the whole, there would be no motivation left to me as an individual. I might as well just roll over and die. Human beings are individuals, not amorphous wholes, so if I succeed in becoming one with all, there wouldn't even be any reason left for me to eat, let alone do anything else."

Ken: "Whole and part are not mutually exclusive. Mystics still feel pain, and hunger, and laughter, and joy. To be part of a larger whole doesn't mean that the part evaporates, just that the part finds its ground or its meaning. You are an individual, yet you also feel that you are a part of the larger unit of a family, which is part of the larger unit of a society. You already feel that, you already feel that you are a part of several larger wholes, and those wholes – like your life with Devers – give your life much value and meaning. Mysticism is just the even larger identity of also feeling part of the cosmos at large, and thus finding even greater meaning and value. Nothing contradictory about that. It's a direct experience of a larger identity, it doesn't mean your arms fall off."

"And so it went!"

Osho in the Book of Understanding

"Man is not born perfect. He is born incomplete, he is born as a process. He is born on the way, as a pilgrim. That is his agony and his ecstasy, too; agony because he cannot rest, he has to go ahead, he has always to go ahead. He has to seek and search and explore. He has to become, because his being arises only through becoming. Becoming is his being. He can only be if he is on the move. Evolution is intrinsic to man's nature, evolution is his very soul. And those who take themselves for granted remain unfulfilled. Those who think they are born complete remain unevolved. Then the seed remains the seed. It never becomes a tree and never knows the joys of spring and the sunshine and the rain, and the ecstasy of bursting into millions of flowers. That explosion is the fulfilment, that explosion is what existence is all about—exploding into millions of flowers. When the potential becomes the actual, only then is man fulfilled".

- Osho, The Book of Understanding

Geshe Roache

These things often wind up being glib memes uncovered at some later point by pedants... but nevertheless, I dug the sentiment ;-D

"There's no word in Tibetan for 'guilty.' The closest thing is 'intelligent regret that decides to do things differently".

- Geshe Roache

Jiddu Krishnamurti

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society".

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Samuel Beckett - "The old ego dies hard..."

"The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and the victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to that reality – an exposure that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It disappears – with wailing and gnashing of teeth".

- Samuel Beckett

Echo

"I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state, 'I hurt' or, 'I hate' or, 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten" 

- from Anita Brookner's, Look At Me (1980).

Carl Rogers speaking with a heartwarming love for people...

"What is this book about? Let me try to give an answer which may, to some degree, convey the living experience that this book is intended to be.  This book is about the suffering and the hope, the anxiety and the satisfaction, with which each therapist's counselling room is filled. It is about the uniqueness of the relationship each therapist forms with each client, and equally about the common elements which we discover in all these relationships.  This book is about the highly personal experiences of each one of us. It is about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself - striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience, and yet deeply fearful of the prospect. This book is about me, as I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able. It is about me as I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavour that it has for him. It is about me as I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place. It is about me as I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality - as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth in process in which I have had an important and facilitating part. It is about both the client and me as we regard with wonder the potent and orderly forces which are evident in this whole experience, forces which seem deeply rooted in the universe as a whole. The book is, I believe, about life, as life vividly reveals itself in the therapeutic process - with its blind power and its tremendous capacity for destruction, but with its overbalancing thrust toward growth, it the opportunity for growth is provided".

- Carl Rogers, in the chapter entitled 'This is Me' in his book On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy.