2/ It is as if they wished their hearts could beat more rhythmically, their stomachs quit signaling hunger, as if they could be the sovereign owners of the totality of human consciousness. Things would indeed be so much better–think they–if such were the case.
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13/ We rarely pay such gravitas any more, to anything. We change the question as often as we hope for a different answer that works. We jump from one method to the other, one silver bullet to the next, never understanding that we doom ourselves to a perpetual desperate seeking.
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14/ Coming back to Narcissus, it was not his narcissism that killed him finally, but his naiveté. It is this very same naiveté, born out of a refusal to drop the mirror for a while, to see, to listen, that is the very danger our deep-seated anxiety warns us about.
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15/ If we refuse hopelessness, if we refuse anxiety, confusion, frustration, and every other message our wise bodies transmit to our consciousness, we are walking, mirror in hand, towards the edge of Narcissus's lake, and one day we are sure to drown.
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16/ The mirror offers no growth, no evolution, no transcendence; this, too, the ancients knew in some wordless, instinctive manner, and they would not tolerate a minute of the so-called elevated word-games of psychobabble we throw around today to make us feel smarter.
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17/ My beloved Henry Miller wrote “Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.” It is through chaos that one arrives at this certainty, and through giving up the ghost of that elusive mirror.
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PS
@IntegralStory is of course, correct, in pointing out that I have omitted many aspects of the story of Narcissus in my using it in this impromptu thread. The actual myth itself is a subtler and more meaningful affair than what I portrayed, and is recommended to all.Show this thread
End of conversation
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