seth dowler

“Psychologically, if we do not reject old habits and beliefs when confronted with the possibility of a better way of being, we end up imprisoned by a tyrannical ego complex that will perpetuate any illusion just to keep control.”
― Dennis William Hauck, The Emerald Tablet: Alchemy for Personal Transformation

“A man in a boat is crossing a river when he sees an empty boat on course to collide with him.

This doesn’t make him angry even though he’s an angry person.

But then he sees someone is in the boat — he calls out, telling them to change direction.

When his first call gets no response, he calls out again.

And when the second is also met with silence, he calls out a third time, throwing in some insults for good measure.

Before, he wasn't angry — now he is.

Before, the other boat was empty — now there's someone in it.

When you imagine the boats empty you won’t be so angry.”
― Zhuangzi

“So it is. Once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think every book is the same, finished in one reading. But it is not so. And gradually the modern mind will realize it again. The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning. It is, as usual, a question of values: we are so overwhelmed with quantities of books that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. Because if a certain book can call you to read it six times, it will be a deeper and deeper experience each time, and will enrich the whole soul, emotional and mental.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

“Certainly this is an animated world, a world of the simplest things. No world of will-be or must-be, it seems to me, rather a world of maybe with entirely undetermined possibilities, a world of colorful twilight. It seems as if there are only modest waysides here, close at hand, no distant targets, no broad straight military roads. No heaven above, no hell below. A strange world in between--everything merges in soft shades--a colorful painting, harmonically fused in itself.”
― C.G. Jung, The Black Books