a conversation

dion fortune, from psychic self-defense:

"if we look at the universe around us we cannot fail to realize that there must be some overruling plan co-ordinating its infinite complexity. if we take into our hands and examine minutely any living thing, however simple, equally must we realise that the ordered diversity of its parts is built up on a determining framework. science has sought in vain for this organising principle; it will never find it on the physical plane, for it is not physical. it is not the inherent nature of atoms which causes them to arrange themselves in complex patterns of living tissues. the driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed. we live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. we move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them."

marie louise von franz, from alchemy:

"the science of physics, in the final resort, postulates matter as something unconscious, namely something of which we cannot become conscious. by definition the unconscious is the same thing: it is something psychological of which we cannot become conscious, and we never know how our descriptions of the unconscious are combined with matter, which creates the whole conflict between the inner and the outer. in the final analysis it is consciousness that makes the conflict between the inner and the outer by projecting the one as materially real and the other as psychologically real, because we do not really know the difference between material reality and the psyche. actually, if we look at it honestly, we are confronted with something unknown which appears sometimes as matter and sometimes as psyche, and how the two are linked we do not know as yet. the alchemists did not know and we do not know either. it is a life mystery which seems to manifest both psychologically and materially. if we describe it from the outside with an extraverted statistical approach it appears as matter, and if we approach it from within it appears as what we like to call the unconscious."

nikos kazantzakis, from zorba the greek:

"what is this world? [...] what is its aim and in what way can we help to attain it during our ephemeral lives? the aim of man and matter is to create joy [...]-- others would say 'to create spirit,' but that comes to the same thing on another plane. but why? with what object? and when the body dissolves, does anything at all remain, and does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?"

h.d. (hilda doolittle), from the mysteries:

"The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass
I multiply,
renew and bless
Iacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead
I am red wine and bread.

I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you."