I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambigiuous phyiscal universe.
Press conference [on the movie Carrington] yielded the usual crop of daftness. I've been asked if I related personally to Carrington's tortured relationship with sex and replied that no, not really, I'd had a very pleasant time since I was fifteen. This elicited very disapproving copy from the Brits ... No wonder people think we don't have sex in England.
The battle is a collision of power, of gods themselves: man is only a pawn in these terrible games, or their scene, or their medium; but man's greatness consists precisely in his act of becoming such medium. By this act he becomes imbued with a soul and identical with the powers.
The Fall, a time when the illusion of the Maya fades away, a freedom from the identification with the illusory persona. For as the trees let go of their leaves to embrace the new season each year, there is no need to fight the shadows that form the illusion or the masks that form our egoic personas, but rather enjoy the illusion for what it is and find the freedom to accept and play a role outside of identification.
A monkey's mind is curious. So we can treasure that; as we are curious too....
Yet meanwhile by simply releasing all attachment or identification to the monkey's chattering we ten merge into the Great Eternal Peace of the All which is One...
An image resists explanation. You relate to it or you do not. You cannot disagree with an image. Through identification with an image you comprehend a totality, rather than learn particular facts.
The history of cruelty inflicted in the name of morals has convinced me that the increase of identification might achieve what moralizing cannot: beautiful actions.
I had written to Ted about the scores of women who had contacted me about their "encounters" with him, although I didn't give specific times or names or places. I commented that he would have had to been superhuman to have been everywhere people "remembered" him. There had been a flurry in the press when campers found a tree in Sanpete County, Utah, with Ted Bundy's name carved in it, and the date: "'78."
"I too am familiar with the phenomena of Ted Bundy sightings," he wrote. "Tells you a lot about the reliability of eye-witness identification, doesn't it. Eye-witness id [sic] is the most inherently unreliable evidence used in court. It also tells you a lot about fear.