Some Interesting Quote Collections as well as an Introduction to Jung with some Jung Quotes

The Seductive Power of Facebook To see the latest status update and earlier ones scroll down to the bold font “STATUS UPDATES” In your face, facebook: A friend posted on Facebook: but i don’t want a mother fucking “timeline”. Me: Facebook doesn’t care what you want. It will just keep reminding you, again and again and again, wearing away your will away day-by-day, until one day, inevitably, in an irreversible moment of weakness you will click OK, and then your life will forever after be defined by Facebook’s new timeline. Stop your futile resistance. You will be assimilated. Friend: i find the forced sentimentality facebook is going for, as if your facebook is a kind of digital memory album, incredibly unappealing and getting in the way of what i actually want from a social network like facebook. at best, this is an e-mail and photo storage and info sharing site, and while there is an obvious narrative element, forcing it to be crafted around a personal narrative breaches into that cloudy privacy area facebook isn’t great at. It’s kind of like a website that doesn’t understand it’s own function and personal space – I feel like that’s why myspace fizzled out [...]

I have been collecting quotations for a
long time. Aphoristic quotations are sometimes the most efficient
and entertaining expression of universal truths. For this reason
one can often find quotes from very divergent sources and times that
say almost the same thing in almost the same words. Sometimes they
may have influenced each other, but often they have been
independently influenced by universal truth. Everyone’s’ ego tends
to create narrow tunnel views of things, especially things that
frustrate us and arouse fear and desire. The right quotations at
the right time can be like diamond bullets that blast holes in those
tunnels and make us aware of much larger vistas.

Introduction. © Jonathan Zap 2004 Someone once described stories as “equipment for living.” Quality fiction does fit that definition and, of course, so does the right non fiction. The modern Taoist quotes presented here are almost the illustration of this definition. They are like a set of tools, deceptively simple in appearance, but made of an adamantine metal that grows stronger and sharper with long use. Someone else said, “Don’t read a book unless it is like a ball of light glowing in your hands.” When you find the right book, at the right time, it can be a sphere of light in your hands. The writings of Deng Ming-Dao (a contemporary Taoist whom I excerpt here) were, for me, like a large sphere of amethyst with cooling, calming purple depths. Areas of the sphere had a gem quality transparency and clarity while others had natural inclusions, areas that were clouded by carbon and iron oxide. The quotes presented here are the parts that, for me, had gem quality transparency, that sparkled in my mind’s eye like jewels flashing in the night of time. If we were to look into an amethyst sphere we would probably all agree on which [...]

The following quote collection has been culled from the Casteneda books and represents a distillation of Don Juan’s philosophy of the warrior. Regardless of what you may think of the literal veracity of these books(they have been pretty successfully debunked as truthful encounters), they were for many in our culture, including me, the first encounter with the philosophy of the warrior. Don Juan’s teachings about the Warrior stance have the perfection of a Samurai sword or arrows shot by a master Zen archer. Their concise, penetrating power is unequaled, and they pierce ego illusions like diamond bullets. Taken together they amount to a Toltec Warrior Manifesto. Someone once defined stories as “equipment for living.” Don Juan’s warrior teachings are also equipment for living, something never to leave behind, like a blade of impervious metal, a powerful ally to accompany you into any sort of wilderness.

I am presently in a phase of reading some of the classics of American self motivational literature. Although I continue to be highly critical of this material if used or presented as a comprehensive psychology, I am also gaining a new appreciation of its value and American character.

The following quotes come from Back to Beginnings, Reflections on the Tao by Huanchu Daoren, translated by Thomas Cleary. They were written around 1600 by a retired Chinese Scholar, Hong Yingming, whose Taoist name, Huanchu Daoren, means “A Wayfarer Back to Beginnings.” In it can be seen a form of lay Taoism dating many centuries further back into history, in which the historical and sociological insights of pristine Confucianism are combined with the advanced educational and psychological know ledges and methodologies of Buddhism and Taoism. Nothing is really known of Huanchu Daoren, except that he wrote these meditations on the Tao which were originally entitled, “Vegetable Root Talks.” He identifies himself as a Confucian, which means that he is a layman; his Taoist epithet, “Back to Beginnings,” says in calendrical symbolism that he has passed the age of sixty, has retired from public affairs, and has started a new cycle of life. A tangent on “sacred texts” : I found more of use to me in this book of Taoist quotes than in the Tao Te Ching. They have a sparkling sanity and at times seem almost funny in their humble and common sense veracity. I don’t like the way [...]

© 2008, Jonathan Zap An Encounter with Jung As a child my psyche was magnetized by emergent archetypal visions from the collective psyche that would appear in my own imagination, and also in many artifacts of popular culture such as science-fiction novels and films. By the time I was nineteen, and a senior in college, I set out to understand these numinous visions and was quickly led to a very personal encounter with Jung. A few years ago I described that encounter as follows: My first encounter with Jung was intense and had the uncanny stamp of what Jung called ‘synchronicity’ all over it. I was nineteen years old and attempting to investigate certain anomalies. I had had experiences of a parapsychological nature, and found myself fascinated by disturbing fantasies and strange visions, which lit up in my imagination with recurrent intensity, but also appeared, inexplicably, outside of my psyche in sci-fi books and movies. This appearance of artifacts of the inside world materializing outwardly, another example of synchronicity, was especially strange as some of the material pre-dated my incarnation. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, for example, had been written two years before I was born. Even more disturbing was [...]

My friend Rob Brezsny asked me to pick out some quotations from my writings that he could feature in his newsletter. I did, but most of the ones he came up with were ones he found himself. Here’s an excerpt from his newsletter, followed by the quotes that I came up with.