The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus Quotes

“That is, through his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“Too much meaning incapacitates the will. Not enough meaning gives us nothing to will for.”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“Gnosis, cosmic consciousness, psychedelic experiences can revive ‘the glory and freshness of a dream’. But as we’ve seen, having too much of this, as seems to happen on these occasions, is equally problematic. We seem to be stuck in the middle between too much meaning and not enough. Too much meaning incapacitates the will. Not enough meaning gives us nothing to will for. Clearly the ideal would be to find some profitable middle ground, that ‘just right’ condition I have called the ‘Goldilocks effect’, where we can open the valve and let in more meaning, so that at thirty-five or forty, we aren’t asking about life ‘Is that all there is?’ but not open the tap so wide that we are flooded with more meaning than we can do anything with.”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“And Hermes Trismegistus himself? Well, we can still learn much from him. If nothing else his call for us to be ‘caretakers’ of the Earth is clearly much needed today, and if this is all we learn from him, we shall profit from it considerably.”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“In response to what he saw as the ‘emptying’ of the world of significance through the rise of the rationalistic reductive view, Rilke, like many other late-Romantic souls, turned inward. The old symbols of meaning — whether religious or classical — were no longer viable; as I’ve remarked elsewhere, ‘like exhausted batteries, they could no longer hold a charge’.23 So Rilke recognized that his task — the task of the poet — was to save the visible, outer world from complete meaninglessness, by taking it into his own soul. The microcosm would save the macrocosm, by sheltering it within itself.”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“If all is one, why do one thing rather another? Why, indeed, wash those dishes?”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

“For the moment I want to focus on why we aren’t aware of ‘everything that is happening everywhere in the universe’ more often. The basic reason is the one that Huxley points out: we simply don’t need to be. ‘To make biological survival possible,’ Huxley writes, ‘Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.’ And ‘what comes out … is the measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet’.35 If I am trying to cross a busy street, being aware of what is happening on some planet in a galaxy many light years away is of no immediate use to me. Being overwhelmed by cosmic consciousness will not help me in the day-to-day struggle for survival, and so I — or who or whatever is responsible for human evolution — edit it out.”
― Gary Lachman, The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World