The Portable Nietzsche, pg 552

“In Athens, in the time of Cicero, who expresses his surprise about this, the men and youths were far superior in beauty to the women. But what work and exertion the service of beauty had the male sex there imposed on itself for centuries! For one should make no mistake about the method in this case: a breeding of feelings and thoughts alone is almost nothing; one must first persuade the body. Strict perseverance in significant and exquisite gestures together with the obligation to live only with people who do not ‘let themselves go’ – that is quite enough for one to become significant and exquisite, and in two or three generations all this becomes inward. It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place – not in the ‘soul’ (as was the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows from that. Therefore the Greeks remain the first cultural event in history: they knew, they did, what was needed; and Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far.”

Living Buddha, Living Christ

“The Buddha was not against God. He was only against notions of God that are mere mental constructions that do not correspond to reality, notions that prevent us from developing ourselves and touching ultimate reality.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 400

“Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros.  The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed.  The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.

“…The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails.  A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of ‘sensibleness’ and ‘good behavior’ is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective.  Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.

“On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems.  The child’s primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether.  This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected.  As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 393

“The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, mush less as a glorification of the ‘good old days’; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary.  The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened.  The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations.  These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men.  Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole.  By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d’état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

“The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious – or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies – is, however, only a passing phenomenon.  Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look.  The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future.  No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built.  Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace.  But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 385

“Compensation is the first requisite for a productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious.  This means that the princess, the soul, is lost to the ego just as much in the patriarchal as in the matriarchal form of castration.

“But, as we have made clear in Part I of this book, behind both forms there looms the original uroboric castration, where the tendencies to differentiation cancel out.  To put it in psychological language: just as mania and melancholia are merely two forms of madness, of the devouring uroboric state which destroys all ego consciousness, so regression to the unconscious, i.e., being devoured by the Great Mother, and the flight to ‘nothing but’ consciousness, i.e., being devoured by the spiritual father, are two forms in which any truly compensated consciousness, and the striving for wholeness, are lost.  Deflation as well as inflation destroys the efficacy of consciousness, and both of them are defeats for the ego.

“Spiritual inflation, a perfect example of which is the frenziedness of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, is a typical Western development carried to extremes.  Behind the overaccentuation of consciousness, ego, and reason – sensible enough in themselves as the guiding aims of psychic development – there stands the overwhelming might of ‘heaven’ as the danger which goes beyond the heroic struggle with the earthly side of the dragon and culminates in a spirituality that has lost touch with reality and the instincts.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 344

“One of the most important attainments of consciousness is its ability to dispose at will of the libido supplied to its system, and to use it more or less independently of the source from which it came.  Just as the animation occasioned in the reader by a ‘stimulating’ book can be applied to a poem, a walk, a bridge party, or a flirtation, without there necessarily being any connection between the book and the ego’s reaction, so the ego can apply as it pleases a portion of the libido accruing to it from the conscious realization of an unconscious content.  This relative freedom of the ego, no matter how much it is abused, is one of its most precious accomplishments.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 338

“This progressive assimilation of unconscious contents gradually builds up the personality, thus creating an enlarged psychic system which forms the basis of man’s inner spiritual history as this makes itself increasingly independent of the collective history going on all around him.  This process, initiated in the first instance by philosophy, has today reached what is chronologically its latest stage in psychology, still of course only in its infancy.  Hand in hand with this there goes a ‘psychization’ of the world.  Gods, demons, heaven and hell are, as psychic forces, withdrawn from the objective world and incorporated in the human sphere, which thereupon undergoes a very considerable expansion.  When we give the name of ‘sexuality’ to what was once experienced as a chthonic divinity, or speaking of ‘hallucination’ instead of revelation, and when the gods of heaven and the underworld are recognized as dominants of man’s unconscious, it means that an immense tract of external world has dropped into the human psyche.  Introjection and psychization are on the other side of the process by which a world of physical objects becomes visible, and this world can no longer be modified by projections to the degree that it could before.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 329

“Pure existence in the unconscious, which primitive man shares with the animal, is indeed nonhuman and prehuman.  The fact that the dawn of consciousness and the creation of the world are parallel processes which throw up the same symbolism indicates that the world actually ‘exists’ only to the degree that it is cognized by an ego.  A differentiated world is the reflection of a self-differentiating consciousness.  The multiple archetypes and symbol groups split off from a primordial archetype are identical with the ego’s greater range of experience, knowledge, and insight.  Under the total impact of experience in the dawn period no particularized forms could be recognized, for the tremendous force of it extinguished the ego in a sort of numinous convulsion.  But a more informed human consciousness can experience, in the multiplicity of religions and philosophies, theologies and psychologies, the innumerable facets and meanings of the numinous, now anatomized into image and symbol, attribute and revelation.  That is to say, although the primal unity can only be experienced fragmentarily, it has at least come within range of conscious experience, whereas for the undeveloped ego it was utterly overwhelming.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 327

“The more complex a content is, the less it can be grasped and measured by consciousness, whose structure is so one-sided that it can attain to clarity only over a limited area.  In this respect consciousness is built analogously to the eye.  There is one spot where vision is sharpest, and larger areas can be perceived clearly only by continuous eye-movements.  In the same way, consciousness can only keep a small segment sharply in focus; consequently it has to break up a large content into partial aspects, experiencing them piecemeal, one after he other, and then learn to get a synoptic view of the whole terrain by comparison and abstraction.

“An advanced consciousness will therefore split the bivalent content into a dialectic of contrary qualities.  Before being so split, the content is not merely good and bad at once; it is beyond good and evil, attracting and repelling, and therefore irritating to consciousness.  But if there is a division into good and evil, consciousness can then take up an attitude.

“Rationalization, abstraction, and de-emotionalization are all expressions of the ‘devouring’ tendency of ego consciousness to assimilate the symbols piecemeal.  As the symbol is broken down into conscious contents, it loses its compulsive effect, its compelling significance, and becomes poorer in libido.  Thus the ‘gods of Greece’ are no longer for us, as they were for the Greeks, living forces and symbols of the unconscious requiring a ritualistic approach; they have been broken down into cultural contents, conscious principles, historical data, religious associations, and so on.  They exist as contents of consciousness and no longer – or only in special cases – as symbols of the unconscious.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 317

“The uroboric tendency of the unconscious to reabsorb all its products by destroying them so as to give them back in new, changed form is repeated on the higher plane of ego consciousness.  Here, too, the analytical process precedes the synthesis, and differentiation is the prime requisite for a later integration.

“In this sense all knowledge rests on an aggressive act of incorporation.  The psychic system, and to an even greater extent consciousness itself, is an organ for breaking up, digesting, and then rebuilding the objects of the world and the unconscious, in exactly the same way as our bodily digestive system decomposes matter physiochemically and uses it for the creation of new structures.”