Knowledge For Its Own Sake

BEYOND DUALITY:
THE ALCHEMIST WHO
WALKS THE AXIS

Most people live within the push and pull of op-posites-light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong. We're taught to choose sides, to pick one, to fight against the other. But there is another path. A rarer one.

It is the path of the Alchemist-one who does not reject the dark nor glorify the light, but transforms through both. It is the path of the Axis Walker-one who no longer belongs to polarity, but has become the still point around which it all spins.
To walk this path is to feel confusion, contradic-tion, even isolation. But eventually... clarity eme-rges. You realize: You are not light. You are not dark. You are the awareness that sees both. You are the choice between them-and the space where they unite.

Art by Seneh.xyz

"Jung said that to be in a situation where there is no way out or to be in a conflict where there is no solution is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out everywhere," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally, because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self, in which he will be inwardly open to an interference by the tertium quod non datur (the third, which is not given, that is, the unknown thing). In this way, as Jung said, the anima is the guide toward the realization of the Self, but sometimes in a very painful manner. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while."

~ Marie-Louise von Franz

”Your past only exists because you think about it. Your fears, your frustrations, only exist because you think about them, Where would they come from if you didn't think about them, if you didn't bring them into play in the present? Where would they come from? How would they be there?
You are the cause of all of your problems. - Ponder this.”

~ RobertAdams

“The Pentacle - The ancients envisioned their world in two halves - masculine and feminine. Their gods and goddesses worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and Yang. When male and female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When they were unbalanced there was chaos.” 🌍☯️

~ Dan Brown

“My existence would leave an indelible mark on yours.”

~ ABRAr ✨

"If you depend on the light of another, when they leave you will be in darkness. Understanding yourself is the beginning of wisdom. Light your own light."

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

“I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

~ Emil Cioran

Be yourself.
Do not react to the world.
Do not even react to your own body.
Do not even react to your own thoughts.
Learn to become the witness.
Learn to be quiet.

~Robert Adams

“If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.”

~ Immanuel Kant

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

~ Aldous Huxley