




A man’s Self is the sum-total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but this clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his land and horse and yacht and bank account.


There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.


In short, human society is a product of evolution. It is created by natural selection and environmental pressures which bring individuals together in a special and powerful way, but it requires no physical change or mutation. It is a composition of ideas and beliefs - a new and essentially psychic phenomenon. A kind of supermind.

One of the great difficulties we physicians have in trying to help nervous patients is their tendency to jump to the conclusion that pains of psychic origin must be mild and wholly imaginary.

The interpretation of dreams is the via regia [i.e., royal road] to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life.

There is a snare, however, in the very essence of knowledge in that it has to be a form of faith, and faith is something psychic rather than spiritual.

The money, technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in cleaning up the earth we live on. But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a psychic cost - the creation of an atmosphere of fear all over the world.

Every action, no matter how trivial, is not the simple effect of the prior psychic state and does not result from a linear determinism but rather is integrated as a secondary structure in global structures and finally in the totality which I am.

We generally prefer our illusions to reality, even though the illusions may lead to tragic consequences... How much of our psychic energy is channeled away by those who drain our lives to enrich theirs.

Science could not survive without a community sharing scientific values. Moral systems do not continue unless individuals subscribe to a common set of ethics. Values are so ephemeral that they require the joining psychic input of a group to retain their hold on each person’s attention. They may be created by individuals, but they must be maintained by the collectivity.

A good society makes it possible for each person to develop the skills necessary to experience flow in socially productive activities. At the same time, it guards against anyone’s exploiting the psychic energy of another person for his or her own advantage. There is a constant watch for oppressors and parasites. According to this perspective, freedom does not apply to doing, but to being.

From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is - provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime's worth of psychic energy... As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person's life.

In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out – a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend… Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning.

Problems linked to illness, such as psychic crises, but also pains of a physiological nature (fever, migraines, rheumatic pains) can be assumed to be just so many initiatory trials. Uncovering the religious significance of illness and physical pain constitutes in effect shamanism’s essential contribution to the history of spirit.