It is important to point out that we all need several personas, that is, the right mask for the right occasion. Jung was once lecturing on the topic when a student accused him of being hypocritical if he used a persona. Jung said that he had just had a fight with his wife, and he was still angry, but that anger had nothing to do with the students, nor with their reason for getting themselves to the Institute that morning. It was neither fair to himself nor to them to show that anger there. However, he said, he intended to finish the fight when he went home. The point is that we must be conscious enough to know when we are using a persona and for what reason. Otherwise we easily identify with a particular persona which obliges us to repress our genuine feelings and prevents us from acting on them at the right time and and place. The persona is necessary because people at different levels of consciousness respond to a situation with very different antennae. Naively or deliberately, making oneself vulnerable to psychic wounding without good reason is foolish. To be wary of casting pearls before swine is not conceit but plain common sense. — Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

On the correct use of personas.

To use relationship as an escape from one's personal journey is to pervert relationship and to sabotage one's own calling. To care for the other as Other is to open to pain as well as joy. Both emotions can be transformative.

— James Hollis, The Eden Project

The generals have a saying: "Rather than make the first move it is better to wait and see. Rather than advance an inch it is better to retreat a yard". This is called going forward without advancing, pushing back without using weapons. There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy your three treasures and become an enemy yourself. When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield. By Lao Tzu from, 'Tao Te Ching' [translation by Stephen Mitchell].

If only more world leaders heeded the wisdom of Lao Tzu's, 'Tao Te Ching'...

It is ✨️

A copy of Stephen Mitchell's version of Lao Tzu's, 'Tao Te Ching' stood next to a white milk jug vase filled with pale pink wild roses.

Treated myself to Stephen Mitchell's illustrated version of Lao Tzu's, 'Tao Te Ching'—such an enduringly wise text.

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A copy of Lisa Marchiano's book, 'The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire' stood next to a white milk jug vase filled with pale pink wild roses.

A vital, necessary read. A must-own alongside Clarissa Pinkola Estés' classic book, 'Women Who Run with the Wolves'.

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If we don't have access to our assertive qualities and our connecting attitudes prove insufficient at protecting us, we can fall into bitterness, seeping anger, victimhood, and passive-aggressive attention-seeking. Because we haven't developed tools to defend ourselves, the world looks like a universally dangerous place. If we remain stuck in this outlook, it can calcify and become part of our character structure, setting us up for a lifetime of retreat and resentment. In contrast, when a woman develops her outlaw energies, she can become a worthy opponent rather than a victim. By Lisa Marchiano from her book, 'The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire'.

Lisa Marchiano continues:

Our connecting feelings and attitudes—empathy, care, nurture, accommodation, and others—won't help us when we are being preyed upon. . . . Predators use our compassion and agreeableness to ensnare us. If we depend only on our connecting qualities when we come under attack, we will be left with a narrow range of options. We can passively hope that someone comes to our rescue, or we can try our hardest to be appealing so that our attacker will be moved to pity. Sometimes, such strategies work, but other times they can be fatally naive. If we can access our empowering feelings and attitudes—cunning, forcefulness, authority, selfishness, anger, and so on—we will have a broader range of strategies that we can employ. By Lisa Marchiano from her book, 'The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire'.

How predators can use our agreeable, accommodating qualities against us.

When the daylight world and surface aspects of life become stuck, vitality and change must be sought on the side tracks and winding paths where the oft-ignored small voices of intuition and instinct wait to have their say and indicate surprising ways to turn and learn.

— M Meade, The Water of Life

What does one feed intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environs? One feeds it life—one feeds it life by listening to it. What good is a voice without an ear to receive it?

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

More on the destructive nature of unlived potential.

According to Dr. Jung, not becoming conscious when one has the possibility of doing so is the worst sin. If there is no germ of possible consciousness within, if God made you unconscious and you just stay that way, then it doesn't matter; but if one does not live up to an inner possibility, then this inner possibility becomes destructive. That's why Dr. Jung also says that in a similar way one of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. That is another aspect. If somebody has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, that psychic energy turns into sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities. By Marie-Louise von Franz from her book, 'Shadow and Evil in Fairytales'

On the destructive nature of unlived potential.

Too, too many women made a terrible vow years before they knew any better. As young women, they were starved of basic encouragement and support, and so filled with sorrow and resignation, they put down their pens, closed up their words, turned off their singing, rolled up their artwork, and vowed never to touch them ever again. A woman in such a condition has inadvertently entered into the oven along with her handmade life. Her life becomes ashes. A woman's life may die away in the fire of self-hatred for complexes can bite hard and, at least for a time, successfully frighten her away from coming too near the work or life that matters to her. 1/2

Many years are spent in not going, not moving, not learning, not finding out, not obtaining, not taking on, not becoming. The vision a woman has for her own life can also be decimated in the flames of someone else's jealousy or someone's plain-out destructiveness toward her. Family, mentors, teachers, and friends are not supposed to be destructive if and when they feel envy, but some decidedly are, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No woman can afford to let her creative life hang by a thread while she serves an antagonistic love relationship, parent, teacher, or friend. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves 2/2

Clarissa Pinkola Estés with a cautionary reminder to women of how:

'There's burning that goes with joy, and there's burning that goes with annihilation. One is the fire of transformation, the other is the fire of decimation only. It is the fire of transformation we want'.

The truth of yesterday must be set aside for what is now the truth of one's psychic life.

— Marie-Louise von Franz, Redemption Motifs in Fairy Tales

Addiction in general, you can say, is a longing for an ecstatic religious state because life is dreary, meaningless and boring. One's work has no meaning, or the home life is cold and unsympathetic. Then there is this longing for an ecstatic state.

— Marie-Louise von Franz, The Cat

[L]ife is not linear or predictable, and when we stop wanting it to be, and begin to engage with its circularity and its mysterious depths—well, that's when things start to get interesting.

— Paul Kingsnorth, Intro to Scatterlings

Intimate relationships tend to call up the primal desire to collapse into a union where we will be lovingly cared for without effort on our part. This Edenic fantasy recalls our experience in infancy, where, hopefully, we were cared for in just this manner. But once we are adults, the truth is that we must take responsibility for getting our needs met. Even in the best relationships, we cannot look to our partner to do this for us. — Lisa Marchiano, The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire

On intimate relationships.

Link here:

The front cover of Michael Meade's audio, 'Fate and Destiny: The Eye of the Pupil, The Heart of the Disciple'. Available to buy from mosaicvoices.org.

I first listened to Michael Meade's audio, 'Fate and Destiny' in 2007 and have listened to it dozens of times since. On it he tells a story called, 'The Prostitute and the Pearls of Wisdom' which has had a profound, life-changing effect on me. Buy it from mosaicvoices.org.

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Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Don't give up—the show goes on.

Psychic inertia is evident in our resistance to any form of change in conditioned patterns, no matter how promising or favourable it may be. Any psychoanalyst knows from dealing with 'resistance' that every basic psychological change entails a deathlike experience for the ego. New possibilities produce so much anxiety that the most destructive past adaptations seem safer and inspire more confidence. — Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest

On our resistance to change.

The Solitary Person Among so many people cosy in their homes, I am like a man who explores far-off oceans. Days with full stomachs stand on their tables; I see a distant land full of images. I sense another world close to me, perhaps no more lived in than the moon; they, however, never let a feeling alone, and all the words they use are so worn. The living things I brought back with me hardly peep out, compared with all they own. In their native country they were wild; here they hold their breath from shame. By Rainer Maria Rilke from, 'Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly'

The Solitary Person by poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognise its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. Sweet Darkness by poet, David Whyte [from The House of Belonging].

Sweet Darkness by poet, David Whyte.

People standing in unconscious spiritual grandiosity, anxious to be idealised by others, are particularly reactive to any lack of dogmatic or ideological agreement. Their narcissism demands a rigid ideological sameness from everyone. They experience the unique interpretations of others as painful narcissistic wounds to their own inflated pretensions, and this provokes a whole constellation of rage responses. They see 'the other' as a demonic agent shaking the foundations of their already shaky narcissistic equilibrium. They see their own unconscious satanic inflation in the face of 'the other'. They generate unconscious genocidal fantasies of holy revenge. They want to become heroes who step up to the task of cleansing the world of chaos and evil. The prospect of performing rituals of sacred violence against 'the other' begins to glow with archetypal energy in their unconscious. By Robert L. Moore from his book, 'Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity'.

Robert Moore on spiritual grandiosity.

When a man is not in touch with his inner king, he will tend to project that on a man. Men make very bad kings. The only true king is the king that a man meets in the deepest parts of his soul.

— Robert Moore, Of Kings and Warriors

Man could be whole. The pattern of wholeness is inherent within his psyche, albeit unrealised. This pattern is not just a static image or ideal; it is dynamic-a trend, functioning like an instinct, leading towards the achievement of wholeness as towards a goal. This goal of the psychic urge can be disregarded by man's conscious ego, even frustrated in some measure by his self-willed and purblind consciousness; if the individual realises, however, what the inner impulses connote, he can use his will power and disposable energy in their service. Division within himself means sickness and misery; wholeness means health-healing for all those inner feuds and self-frustrations which make so many lives meaningless and tragically unsatisfactory. By Jungian, M. Esther Harding from her book, 'Psychic Energy: Its Source and its Transformation'.

On the psyche's potential for wholeness—if only we'd just 'listen in'.

[W]e yearn to experience through others what we fail to bring to realisation within ourselves.

— Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest

A blog post from Online Clarity's, Hilary Barrett on the I Ching's hexagram 57:

The section on the Projection of Consciousness is worth the price of admission alone. I think it also helps if you have an understanding of hexagram 57 [Subtle Penetration] in the I Ching, as experience has shown me the similarities in both processes.

Powerful, grounded, and truly effective stuff.

A copy of Dennis William Hauck's book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy.

Sometimes, the most helpful sources of practical psychospiritual guidance can be the most unlikely. Take Dennis William Hauck's, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy which packs an incredible amount of wisdom. It also complements tarot, astrology, and the I Ching beautifully.

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