Esowteric

Quoted in Max Gorman, Stairway to the Stars: Sufism, Gurdjieff and the Inner Tradition of Mankind.

Image: A Sky Full Of Stars / Joshua Earle / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Unsplash) / Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

Image: A Sky Full Of Stars / Joshua Earle / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Unsplash) / Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. A silhouetted figure stands on a slight rise between two silhouetted hills, looking out at a sky full of stars with light in the distance near the horizon.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises from within us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

~ William Wordsworth, from “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”.

Available at The Internet Archive's library:

archive.org/details/@eso...

And in full, as a PDF, at the FB group Mystical Faction in the Files section:

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Image: Flower Power demonstrator / Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Image: Flower Power demonstrator / Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain. A line of protesters in a grassy open area face a line of military police in uniform with their batons drawn. One of the protesters, a young lady wearing a floppy white hat, a blue-and-white striped top and blue jeans, holds her hand out, offering an MP a red flower, a symbol of 1960s "flower power".

“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not the 1950s, but further ...”

~ H.M. Forester, Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt.

Link in comments.

The Day Dream, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). A woman in a long dark-green robe sits under a tree with a rose and an open book in her, a far-away look in her eyes.

Source: Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

Image: The Day Dream / Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Image containing a text quotation. The text, from Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, reads: The Unconscious and the Inner Life: “The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors—dream, vision, ritual, and religious experience—are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. Thus, in our pride and hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, we cut ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and from the deepest parts of ourselves.”

“The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors ... are largely lost to us ...” ~ Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work.

An intricately patterned and brightly coloured mandala in the shape of a twelve pointed star with several interior layers.

Source: Radmila Moacanin, The Essence of Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism.

Image: Pascalgnome Mandala / Pascalwilson / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouetted profile of a man like Jung lighting his pipe, in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Radmila Moacanin, The Essence of Jung's Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism, reads: The Ego: “According to Jung, the ego, full of distortions and projections, needs to be dissolved before the Self can emerge. The Self, however, which is the totality of the psyche, includes the ego. In the process of individuation one does not destroy the ego, rather one places it in subordinate relation to the Self. The ego is no longer the center of the personality; the Self, the mandala, which unites all opposites, is its center. What is dissolved is the inflated, concrete ego, pursuing its exclusive selfish purposes, just following its own impulses.”

“[A]ccording to Jung, the ego, full of distortions and projections, needs to be dissolved before the Self can emerge. The Self, however, which is the totality of the psyche, includes the ego. In the process of individuation one does not destroy the ego ...”

~ Radmila Moacanin.

A photo showing the head and shoulders of a man facing right, sitting at a polished wooden desk with an open laptop in front of him, phone, notepad and pen to his right, mug to his left. Suffering from burnout, his head is resting on the desk in front of him, and he has his face cupped in his hands.

Source: Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, “Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of ‘Intellect’”

Image: Burnout At Work - Occupational Burnout / Microbiz Mag / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / CC BY 2.0.

An image containing a text quotation. The text, from Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, “Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of ‘Intellect’”, reads: The Need For Soulful, Qualitative Education: “The neglect of the education of the soul is characterised by a lack of intimacy, by an over-emphasis on “competencies” and “tools” – the distancing language of technology, military strategy, surveillance, corporate efficiency, quantification, target-setting and managerialism which increasingly dominates our view of things in the West [...] [Brian] Thorne describes how in his psycho-therapeutic work, he ministers in his consulting room to an ever-growing stream of angry, burnt-out, deeply unfulfilled people who sacrificed their souls in the frantic pursuit of personal achievement and material success. Bound by the imperative to “deliver” so much of what is useless and ephemeral they had failed to see to their own “deliverance”, which in its original meaning is simply their liberation from all such illusion.”

“The neglect of the education of the soul is characterised by a lack of intimacy, by an over-emphasis on “competencies” and “tools” – the distancing language of technology, military strategy, surveillance, corporate efficiency, quantification, target-setting ...”

~ Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas.

What do you get when The Handmaid's Tale meets 2012? Here's the preface ( in English) to the new Italian edition of Dark Star Rising. www.gary-lachman.com/post/apocaly...

Cosmic ‘Winter’ Wonderland, a spectacular colour photo of the heavens taken by NASA.

Source: Robin Robertson, Jung and Frodo: 7 Paths of Individuation in Lord of the Rings.

Image: Cosmic ‘Winter’ Wonderland / NASA / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

An image containing a text quotation. The text, from Robin Robertson, Jung and Frodo: 7 Paths of Individuation in Lord of the Rings, reads: A Sense of Wonder: “[A] good work of fantasy awakens a "sense of wonder" that many of us lost as we grew from children to adults. But isn't that escapism? Many critics argue so. They agree with Rene Descartes, who wrote that "what we commonly call being astonished is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad." In disagreement essayist Adalgisa Lugli argues for a sense of wonder "as one of the essential components of the study of nature and the unraveling of its secrets—wonder defined as a form of learning—an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing."

“[A] good work of fantasy awakens a "sense of wonder" that many of us lost as we grew from children to adults. But isn't that escapism? Many critics argue so. They agree with Rene Descartes ..."

~ Robin Robertson, Jung and Frodo: 7 Paths of Individuation in Lord of the Rings.

A black-and-white photo of a family sitting round watching television in 1958.

Source: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009).

Image: Family watching television 1958 / Evert F. Baumgardner / Wikimedia Commons (orig. National Archives and Records Administration) / Public domain.

Image containing a text quotation, with a grey silhouette of the side of a human skull and white cogs in place of a brain, in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, reads: The Stifling of Intuition: “[S]ince the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty years,* we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them.”

“[S]ince the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision ...”

~ Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009).

Going Underground: Building a Caring Alternative Parallel Society As the poet, dissident, and member of the Czech underground resistance movement during the communist regime, Ivan Martin Jirous wrote, perhaps in “Parallel Polis: An Inquiry”: “If it proves impossible...

Going Underground (Short read) ...

esowteric.vivaldi.net/2026/01/15/g...

In a dimly-lit basement or bunker, a male member of the underground resistance movement, wearing a flat cap, sits at a laptop with his fingers on the keyboard, his features illuminated by the soft glow of the computer screen. Another man sits to his right, wearing headphones and typing on a keyboard. To his right stands a man reading a document. Behind him, a young lady stands checking a mobile phone. Both she and the first man have distinctive armbands, with a red cross on a white background, signifying that they are medics. Near the far wall, close to a large map of Europe, a third man sits working. Above their heads, a single lamp hanging from the ceiling casts a little light in the room.

Going Underground: Building a Caring Alternative Parallel Society – while we are still at liberty to do so ...

Link in comments.

Image: Underground Resistance Movement.

A photo of a brass oil lamp; the sort that genies emerge from when you rub the lamp.

Image: Genie Lamps 1 / Vicki Nunn / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouette of Hermes or Mercury with his caduceus, in the bottom left-hand corner. The text, from Michael Meade, The Genius Myth, reads: The Inner Genius: “The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.”

“The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self ...”

~ Michael Meade, The Genius Myth.

A black-and-white photo of Carl Jung sitting outside in white shirt and tie, holding his pipe in his left hand, and perhaps smiling as he looks into the distance, as if engrossed or lost in thought.

Source: Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings.

Image: Carl Jung / Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (orig. ETH-Bibliothek) / Public domain.

Image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouetted profile of a man like Jung lighting his pipe, in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings, reads: If Not Me, Who? If Not Now, When? [Revisited]: “As he argued in The Undiscovered Self, Jung told the “average” reader that any possibility of avoiding disaster “must begin with an individual.” “It might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and wait for someone else to do what he is loath to do himself.” And what must the individual do, given that all our conscious, rational, scientific efforts seem to only land us deeper in the mire? He must “ask himself whether by chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us.” The basic message of Jung’s last work is the one that cost him his friendship with Freud: that the unconscious is not some dark basement full of unwanted, disreputable things, but a living, creative, and often wise partner with consciousness in the business of becoming a fully actualized human being, a partner who frequently knows more than we—our conscious egos—do, and who speaks to us in symbols, those remarkable products of the transcendent function.”

“... Jung told the “average” reader that any possibility of avoiding disaster “must begin with an individual.” “It might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and wait for someone else to do what he is loath to do himself ...”

~ Gary Lachman, Jung the Mystic.

The sleeping beauty is a painting in the pre-Raphaelite style by John Collier (1850–1934). It shows Sleeping Beauty on a bed in the light beneath a large leaded window, with two women kneeling on the floor. All three are wearing long, brightly-coloured and patterned medieval dresses.

Source: Patrick Harpur, A Complete Guide to the Soul / The Secret Tradition of the Soul.

Image: The sleeping beauty / John Collier (1850–1934) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

An image containing a text quotation, with a couple in fancy dress at a masquerade ball dancing in the bottom left-hand corner. The text, from Patrick Harpur, A Complete Guide to the Soul, or The Secret Tradition of the Soul, reads: Soul-Making: “The self is what spirit spends a lifetime searching for, heroically setting out by land and sea to circumnavigate the globe, to suffer hardship and slay dragons, until he comes to the remote overgrown castle. He hacks a way through, climbs to the top of the tallest tower and – there, the love of his life, Beauty, lies sleeping. He kisses her. She wakes ... . Her waking symbolizes the soul’s dormant state till spirit wakes her, and makes her real. What is less obvious in our heroic age is that the kiss also wakes spirit. He looks around him, rubbing his eyes, and sees that the castle is in fact his castle, the place he started from. Beauty always slept there, but he did not notice her, so eager was he to set out and find her elsewhere. “As soul comes to herself in spirit, so spirit returns to himself in soul – and they are joined in the holy matrimony of the self.”

Soul-Making
~~~~~~~
“The self is what spirit spends a lifetime searching for, heroically setting out by land and sea to circumnavigate the globe, to suffer hardship and slay dragons, until he comes to the remote overgrown castle. He hacks a way through ...”

~ Patrick Harpur.

Seeing with the Right Eyes: Review of Idries Shah Remembered ★★★★★ Tahir Shah (Ed), Idries Shah Remembered . An Afterword to my own Reading Like the Sufi mystical tradition that Idries Shah represents,...

★★★★★ Seeing with the Right Eyes: Review of Idries Shah Remembered, Tahir Shah (Ed). An Afterword to my own Reading ...

mystical-faction.blogspot.com/2025/08/seei...

#IdriesShah #Biography #TahirShah #SufiWay #SufiPath #Sufism #Sufis #Mysticism

YouTube video by CARL JUNG DAILY Why Your Hardest Years Are About To Pay Off In A Way You Can't Imagine - Carl Jung

Why Your Hardest Years Are About To Pay Off In A Way You Can't Imagine | Carl Jung Daily:
Video (28 min 25 sec) ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6lU...

#Jung #CGJung #CarlJung #Individuation #Suffering #Crisis #Transformation

A horizontal light grey and dark grey stone monument that reads "imagine" in block capitals in the centre, with a circle of multi-coloured flowers around the word.

Source: Patrick Harpur, A Complete Guide to the Soul (UK) or The Secret Tradition of the Soul (US).

Image: Imagined (38550743084) / Felix Stahlberg / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / CC BY 2.0.

Image containing a text quotation, with the small figure of a woman sensing an aroma in the air, in the bottom left-hand corner. The text, from Patrick Harpur, A Complete Guide to the Soul in the UK or The Secret Tradition of the Soul in the US, reads: The Soul’s Imagining: “Our waking consciousness, so contained within our heads, so ego-centered, so floodlighted, makes the dream seem dim and ill-defined. It naturally flees from the light and from a consciousness that would grab it, badger it for subliminal messages, interpret it, handcuff it, and interrogate it for its secret. If, however, we were to cultivate a more daimonic consciousness, we could slide more easily into dreams, adapt to them, changing shape if necessary, and so return to wakefulness with full memory of our otherworldly sojourn. We might even learn to let the dream surface while we are awake, for dreaming goes on all the time - it is nothing other than soul’s imagining.”

“Our waking consciousness, so contained within our heads, so ego-centered, so floodlighted, makes the dream seem dim & ill-defined. It naturally flees from the light and from a consciousness that would grab it, badger it for subliminal messages...” ~ Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul.

A photo of puppet character Yoda, as depicted in The Empire Strikes Back / Lucasfilm Ltd. / Starwars Fandom / Fair Use.

Source: James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up.

Image: Puppet character Yoda, as depicted in The Empire Strikes Back / Lucasfilm Ltd. / Starwars Fandom / Fair Use.

An image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouette of a woman, arms outstretched in joy, in the bottom left-hand corner. The text, from James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, reads: One Thing Leads to Another: “Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing.” “To bear the anxiety of doubt is to be lead to openness; openness leads to revelation; revelation leads to discovery; discovery leads to enlargement.”

“Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing ...”

~ James Hollis.

Coleman Barks - Wikipedia

R.I.P. Coleman Bryan Barks (April 23, 1937 – February 23, 2026) ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman...

#ColemanBarks #Rumi