Fantasia of the Unconscious quotes

There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the Atom. All I say is Om!

The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance.

I don't know where I come from—nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells which are my biological origin became the me which I am.

e are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe.

The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round.

Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.

I am I. And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them.

There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears.

I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done.

We won't be pinned down, either.

We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: I am I.

And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them.

I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity.

We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done.

But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur.

Still, the world-regenerators may really be quite excellent performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth.

Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye.

As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it?

Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm going to tell everybody.

Nothing brings a man home to himself like telling everybody.

And I will drive you home to yourself, do you hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody.

When, at the moment of conception, the two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears—not the result of the fusion merely. Something more.

The quality of individuality cannot be derived.

The new individual, in his singleness of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul.

he primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our consciousness.

The mind is but the last flower, the cul de sac.

The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static.

This root of all knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done.

The knowledge that I am I can never be thought: only known.

This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically the moment the two parent nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one original.

A change has come. Here I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal, exultant self. The wonder is without me.

The wonder is outside me.

And I can no longer exult and know myself the dark, central sun of the universe. Now I look with wonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which is outside me, beyond me, not me.

I can feel them standing there. And they won't let me get on about the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday.

It is half rainy too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air.

Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around.

It is half rainy too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir.

The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around.

I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only thing is to give way to them.

Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence.

Big, tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them.

Or barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.

And I listen for their silence. Big, tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks.

Great full-blooded trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.

Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that frightens you.

Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns.

A vast individual life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree.

Something that frightens you.

you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. You keep on looking at it in part and parcel.

It's no good looking at a tree, to know it.

The only thing is to sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother. That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between the toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of the trunk.

And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually stroked into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book.

My tree-book, really.

I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans worshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of knowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chip of the old Aryan block.

and his tips in high air, where we can only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his two directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, thoughtless soul.

Where does he even keep his soul?—Where does anybody?

A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me.

So vast and powerful and exultant in his two directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?—Where does anybody?

A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a while.

The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust.

I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength.

I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust.

They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree.

It must have been wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry Sicily, open to the day.

The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a face, and a human voice.

Men spoke, and their fountains piped an answer.

But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable life which had no voice.

They met the faceless silence of the Black Forest.

This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy.

You can sacrifice the whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all this.

But they will live you down.

The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So the Herr Baron told me.

Suffice to say the equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such thing as an actual norm, a living norm.

A norm is merely an abstraction, not a reality.

The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and cannot be any actual norm of human conduct.

Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then let us, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how it should be.

We've got to learn to live from the center of our own responsibility only, and let other people do the same.

To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planes of consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connection between child and mother, child and father also, from the start.

"You love mother, don't you, dear?"—Just a piece of indecent trickery of the spiritual will.

The great emotions like love are unspoken. Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will.

"Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!"

And they must occasionally tell stories—tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must all sometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don't choose that everybody shall see our nakedness.

Morality is a delicate act of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription.

Beyond a certain point the child shall not pull the cat's tail, or steal the sugar, or spoil the furniture, or tell lies. But I'm afraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must.

So there we are with the human body. There must have been, and must be a central god in the machine of each animate corpus.

The little soul of the beetle makes the beetle toddle.

The little soul of the homo sapiens sets him on his two feet. Don't ask me to define the soul. You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad.

Then, oh then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and timeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun...."

Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropic society for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles.

Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual and incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose a rider for that also.

We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each of us got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul.

Mostly it can't ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicycles running amok.

We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thick that we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare!

The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche.

Here the soul goes in and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home.

But the root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast.

The goal is not ideal. The aim is not mental consciousness. We want effectual human beings, not conscious ones.

The final aim is not to know, but to be.

There never was a more risky motto than that: Know thyself. You've got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself.

In the same way, a child can never have a finite conception of either of its parents. It can have a very much more finite, finished conception of its aunts or its friends.

The portrait of the parent can never be quite completed in the mind of the son or daughter.

As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished.

And the nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close.

To know, is to lose.

When I have a finished mental concept of a beloved, or a friend, then the love and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level of an acquaintance.

So now we see that we can never know ourselves.

Knowledge is to consciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indication of the way which has been traveled before.

Knowledge is not even in direct proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry in a man who is a rather poor being:

Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotional reciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individual towards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love.

A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled.

Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

Also morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as need be.

Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive.

Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or both.

and that to continue to put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of ennui, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche.

The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let us leave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches like medlars.

The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, like the leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, and according to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamic centers of life.

There are few, few people in whom the living impulse and reaction develops and sublimates into mental consciousness.

There are all kinds of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples of knowledge.

The modern world insists, however, that every individual shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest of mankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree. A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing.

And to force the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't want him to see a proper horse.

The child is not a little camera.

He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature.

So that to this day a Noah's Ark tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow.

The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision is manifold.

And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to a child—and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur the soul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns and squareness, and a long tail.

He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why the sun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, than anything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be, unanswerable. They are not questions at all.

They are exclamations of wonder, they are remarks half-sceptically addressed.

When a child says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls!

And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control.

The living soul is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis.

What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of consciousness and function come awake.

Now new relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence. Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period of Schwärmerei, of young adoration and of real initial friendships.

A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and enemies.

A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never dies.

A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never dies.

It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul.

And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality.

And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness.

But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality.

All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible for it.

And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality.

All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world.

It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible for it.

And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech on the lips.

Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the heart craves for new activity.

The heart craves for new activity. For new collective activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men.

It is a great motion in the opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire in men is this desire for great purposive activity.

When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost.

When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.

So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of our fulfillment comes through love, through strong, sensual love. But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own soul in strength within him, deep and alone.

The deep, rich aloneness, reached and perfected through love.

And the passing beyond any further quest of love.

It seems the highest. You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother or sister.

The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is twenty. Afterwards—repetition, disillusion, and barrenness.

And the cause?—always the same. That parents will not make the great resolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their own souls in quiet and fullness.

It is something which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness. Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience. But not according to any ideal.

To submit the conscience to a creed, or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin.

To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook's tourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak several languages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fish for supper.

And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig one in the ribs occasionally.

Because really, being alone in peace means being two people together.

Two people who can be silent together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course:

And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace means being two people together.

Two people who can be silent together, and not conscious of one another outwardly.

Me in my silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs if one gets too vague or self-sufficient.

her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit, and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all the clamor lapse. That is the best I know.

I think it is terrible to be young.

The ecstasies and agonies of love, the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships, love and marital relationships especially.

The problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle.

There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking the circle.

And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of the poison-gas competition presumably.

And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzy were only so much breaking of eggs.

It isn't our business to live anybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own.

Nor to save anybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong, which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore the false fine frenzy of the seething world.

The atom? Why, the moment you discover the atom it will explode under your nose. The moment you discover the ether it will evaporate. The moment you get down to the real basis of anything, it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents.

And the more problems you solve, the more will spring up with their fingers at their nose, making a fool of you.

There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and moons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result of living individuals.

Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without.

It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals.

And life means nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived.

Fire, we say, is combustion.

It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense.

Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it is that which happens when matter is raised to a certain temperature—and so forth and so forth.

This is the circuit of our immediate individual existence.

We stand upon our own grave, with our death fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left.

The earth's center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the sun and the moon.

As for the origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but one origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul originated everything, and has itself no origin.

So that time is a matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a mental trick.

Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its own individual soul.

the circuit of the earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day.

For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent.

And this body of death is removed or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death-circuit, while we sleep.

To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes.

Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever.

Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something threatens us from the outer mechanical, or accidental death-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul.

Because—and this is very important—the dream-process loves its own automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism.

While the soul really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism.

For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process.

Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will dream of his funeral.

Every desire has its corresponding fear that the desire shall not be fulfilled.

It is fear which forms an arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present you with his wedding.

It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past.

Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance—all of which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over, that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or bitterly.

Evening is the time for this.

It transfers its voice and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep swaying of the blood in sex passion.

Sex is our deepest form of consciousness.

It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.

For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual polarity between the sexes.

As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling.

Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her.

As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman.

Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her.

There is a moment of pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.

We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty—their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration.

We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day.

It is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act.

The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks.

Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp.

It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium.

I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative.

But I also feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is absolute: in its own being.

And that all things in the universe are just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual living creatures are relative to each other.

And what about a goal?

There is no final goal. But every step taken has its own little relative goal.

So what about the next step?

We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because we just aren't all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn't work.

Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves.

And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her natural functions just like anybody else. We must always keep in line with this fact.

Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source.

You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.

When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself."

The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.

When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself."

The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next society.

a duality so bitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame and terror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it is Moloch, and he cannot escape it.

The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days and our nights.

Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots.

From the dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, in genuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There is even no interference of the upper centers.

Love is supposed to be blind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles.

But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing the powerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the female, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message. And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in some male.

We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman.

You don't find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.

Their beams cross the great gulf which is between them.