Robert L. Moore > Quotes

“My friends, I think we need to face how difficult it is for us to become empathic with other spiritual traditions and accept their legitimate needs for recognition and affirmation, their needs for being seen and given significant respect. Why? Kohut said that when we were children, we had not yet developed what he called “the cohesive self,” or what we would call a self-system that is integrated and stable. What we needed from others he called “mirroring.” We need to be seen. We need to be recognized and affirmed. You and I in our spiritual traditions would say we need to be blessed. We long for an experience of blessing.4”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“This function of the King energy shows up everywhere in ancient mythology and in ancient interpretations of actual history. In ancient Egyptian mythology, as James Breasted and Henri Frankfort have shown, the world arose from the formlessness and chaos of a vast ocean in the form of a central Hill, or Mound. It came into being by the decree, by the sacred “Word,” of the Father god, Ptah, god of wisdom and order. Yahweh, in the Bible, creates in exactly the same way. Words, in fact, define our reality; they define our worlds. We organize our lives and our worlds by concepts, by our thoughts about them, and we can only think in terms of words. In this sense, at least, words make our reality and make our universe real.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The Warrior energy also shows what we can call a transpersonal commitment. His loyalty is to something—a cause, a god, a people, a task, a nation—larger than individuals, though that transpersonal loyalty may be focused through some important person, like a king. In the Arthurian stories, Lancelot, though fiercely devoted to Arthur and to Guinevere, is ultimately committed to the ideal of chivalry and to the God who lies behind such things as noble quests, “might for right,” and the lifting up of the oppressed.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The boy under the power of the Mama's Boy is what is called autoerotic. He may compulsively masturbate. He may be into pornography, seeking the Goddess in the nearly infinite forms of the female body. Some men under the infantile power of the Mama's Boy aspect of the Oedipal Child have vast collections of pictures of nude women, alone or making love with men. He is seeking to experience his masculinity, his phallic power, his generativity. But instead of affirming his own masculinity as a mortal man, he is really seeking to experience the penis of God—the Great Phallus—that experiences all women, or rather that experiences union with the Mother Goddess in her infinity of female forms. Caught up in masturbation and the compulsive use of pornography, the Mama's Boy, like all immature energies, wants just to be. He does not want to do what it takes to actually have union with a mortal woman and to deal with all the complex feelings involved in an intimate relationship. He does not want to take responsibility.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

“It is important to understand that most people have narcissistic pathology, so this is not to dismiss Jung. We all have narcissistic problems. Someone has suggested that we need a “Humans Anonymous Twelve Step Program,” to help everyday people deal with their residual narcissistic pathology, and I agree. It's another way of saying that we need a more practical approach to our spirituality if we are to be effective in containing and channeling our grandiose energies.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“He is emotionally distant as long as he is in the Warrior. This does not mean that the man accessing the Warrior in his fullness is cruel, just that he does not make his decisions and implement them out of emotional relatedness to anyone or anything except his ideal.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of mature men, and lacking the societal cohesion and institutional structures for actualizing ritual process, it’s “every man for himself.” And most of us fall by the wayside, with no idea what it was that was the goal of our gender-drive or what went wrong in our strivings. We just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, put down, unloved and unappreciated, often ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holding the empty bag of our lost self-esteem. We cave in to a dog-eat-dog world, trying to keep our work and our relationships afloat, losing energy, or missing the mark. Many of us seek the generative, affirming, and empowering father (though most of us don’t know it), the father who, for most of us, never existed in our actual lives and won’t appear, no matter how hard we try to make him appear.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Gnosis was the Greek word for “knowing” on a deep psychological or spiritual level. The Gnostics were knowers of the inner depths of the human psyche and the hidden dynamics of the universe.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

“Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“the magician—the holy man, the witch doctor, the shaman. Whatever his title, his specialty is knowing something that others don’t know.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Campbell's work explains what world mythology says about all this. This includes every mythology, every mythic world, not just the Christian tradition. Human beings before the modern era understood these things. The modern world has forgotten how all this works and turned instead to the idea that we can strip-mine this territory. We expect to go in there and get some of that god-energy by strip-mining. This is the heroic modern ego trying to take control of it. We think that we do not have time to make long heroic journeys down into the god-energy and then come back again. We turn spirituality into a West Virginia coal mine, and our fantasy is that we can just mine all this god-energy whenever we need it and then we can manipulate it.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“This Gnostic movement, concentrating as it did on insight and self-knowledge, was unpopular with the vast majority of early Christians, and it was persecuted out of existence by the Catholic church. Acquiring knowledge of whatever kind, but especially of the hidden workings of the psyche, is difficult and painful work that most of us have never wanted to do.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“There are a number of techniques we can use in this construction project. Analysis of dreams, the re-entering and changing of our dreams, active imagination (in which the Ego, among other things, dialogues with the energy patterns within, thereby achieving both differentiation from and access to them), psychotherapy in a variety of forms, meditation on the positive aspects of the archetypes, prayer, magical ritual process with a spiritual elder, various forms of spiritual discipline, and other methods are all important to the difficult process of turning boys into men.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The Magician, then, is the archetype of thoughtfulness and reflection. And, because of that, it is also the energy of introversion. What we mean by introversion is not shyness or timidity but rather the capacity to detach from the inner and outer storms and to connect with deep inner truths and resources. Introverts, in this sense, live much more out of their centers than other people do. The Magician energy, in aiding the formation of the Ego-Self axis, is immovable in its stability, centeredness, and emotional detachment. It is not easily pushed and pulled around.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Kohut noticed that grandiosity, rather than improving your sex life, either makes you impotent or makes you so promiscuous that you cannot sustain relationships and you put yourself in danger of getting AIDS and dying. In other words, grandiosity tends to destroy you if you don't face up it and learn how to regulate it.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“The trouble with most of us is not that we feel too much passion, but that we don’t feel our passion much at all. We don’t feel our joy. We don’t feel able to be alive and to live our lives the way we wanted to live them when we began. We may even think that feelings and, in particular, our feelings, are annoying encumbrances and inappropriate for a man. But let us not surrender our lives! Let us find the spontaneity and joy of life inside ourselves. Then not only will we live our lives more abundantly, but we will enable others to live, perhaps for the first time in their lives.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves. Ours is a culture of the individual rather than the collective.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The Warrior as avenging spirit comes into us when we are very frightened and very angry. A kind of bloodlust, as it is called, comes over men in the stressful situation of actual combat, as well as in other stressful life situations.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“Our own culture has pseudo-rituals instead. There are many pseudo-initiations for men in our culture. Conscription into the military is one. The fantasy is that the humiliation and forced nonidentity of boot camp will “make a man out of you.” The gangs of our major cities are another manifestation of pseudo-initiation and so are the prison systems, which, in large measure, are run by gangs.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“the Lover energy, through the mystics, intuits the ultimate Oneness of all that is and actively seeks to experience that Oneness in daily life, while it still dwells in a mortal, finite man. The same boy who could imagine himself as an ant also reported what we could see as the beginnings of mystical experience in his account of a peculiar feeling he had on certain occasions at a YMCA camp one summer. Once a week, the campers would be roused from their beds late at night and trekked along obscure forest paths in the pitch blackness to a central clearing, there to watch a reenactment of ancient Native American songs and dances. This boy said that often, as he was snaking his way along behind the other boys from his cabin, he would have the almost uncontrollable urge to open his arms wide to the darkness and to fly into it, feeling the trees tear through his “spiritual body” with no pain, just a feeling of ecstasy. He said he felt like he wanted to be “one” with the mystery of the dark unknown and with the threatening yet strangely reassuring night forest. These kinds of sensations are exactly what the mystics of the world’s religions describe when they talk about their urge to become One with the Mystery.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“when we are accessing the King energy correctly, as servants of our own inner King, we will manifest in our own lives the qualities of the good and rightful King, the King in his fullness. Our soldiers of fortune will drop to their knees, appropriately, before the Chinese Emperor within. We will feel our anxiety level drop. We will feel centered, and calm, and hear ourselves speak from an inner authority. We will have the capacity to mirror and to bless ourselves and others. We will have the capacity to care for others deeply and genuinely. We will “recognize” others; we will behold them as the full persons they really are. We will have a sense of being a centered participant in creating a more just, calm, and creative world. We will have a transpersonal devotion not only to our families, our friends, our companies, our causes, our religions, but also to the world. We will have some kind of spirituality, and we will know the truth of the central commandment around which all of human life seems to be based: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God [read, “the King”] with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And thy neighbor as thyself.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“The conclusion of both modern physics and depth psychology is that things are not what they seem. What we experience as normal reality—about ourselves and nature—is only the tip of an iceberg that arises out of an unfathomable abyss. Knowledge of this hidden realm is the province of the Magician, and it is through the Magician energy that we will come to understand our lives with a degree of profundity not dreamed of for at least a thousand years of Western history.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“primordial Magician in men has manifested itself most fully in what anthropologists refer to as the shaman. The shaman in traditional societies was the healer, the one who restored life, who found lost souls, and who discovered the hidden causes of misfortune. He was the one who restored wholeness and fullness of being to both individuals and communities.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“It is the mortal king’s duty not only to receive and take to his people this right order of the universe and cast it in societal form but, even more fundamentally, to embody it in his own person, to live it in his own life. The mortal king’s first responsibility is to live according to Ma’at, or Dharma, or the Tao. If he does, the mythology goes, everything in the kingdom—that is, the creation, the world—will also go according to the Right Order.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“It can be said that life’s perhaps most fundamental dynamic is the attempt to move from a lower form of experience and consciousness to a higher (or deeper) level of consciousness, from a diffuse identity to a more consolidated and structured identity.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“These archetypes provide the very foundations of our behaviors—our thinking, our feeling, and our characteristic human reactions. They are the image makers that artists and poets and religious prophets are so close to.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“How well we transform ourselves from men living our lives under the power of Boy psychology to real men guided by the archetypes of Man psychology will have a decisive effect on the outcome of our present world situation.”
― Robert L. Moore, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects

“It is sheer fantasy to think that you can ever transform your grandiose energies so they will never seduce you again, that you can ever prevent your grandiosity from being seductive. Sometimes people think if they just prayed enough, or went to enough masses, then their grandiosity would stop being seductive. Or if they became a cardinal, or a bishop, or a mother superior, it would not be seductive anymore. The truth, of course, is just the opposite, because the more successful you get, the more seductive grandiosity gets. The more traumas and tragedies you have in your life, the more grandiosity will attack you. It can tell you how impressive it is that you are still alive, or it can chide you into depression by suggesting you might as well go ahead and commit suicide. Many suicidal thoughts come from a grandiose perfectionism.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“It is not enough, however, to say like some Jungians that the evil is all inside, and any trouble I have with you is just because I have it in my shadow. “If I could just integrate my shadow then I would see you for the wonderful, complete, perfect person that you are.” That is not true either. Such a position taken to extreme would suggest that if the Jews had just integrated their shadows in the late thirties, then Adolf Hitler would have seemed like a nice fellow. That can't be right. No matter how much the people in the ghettoes integrated their Jewish shadows, Hitler was still an objective reality out there in the real world trying to kill them. Remember the old joke, “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.” That is true in psychology as well.”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity