Necessity is the mother of invention.

You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.

Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled, but these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.

Instead of saying “This is my child,” they should ask “Who is this child who happens to be mine?” Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for where the kid’s destiny may show itself– like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses, so they set up some psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptom may be the most crucial part of the kid.

Where you are is as important as where you came from. What you do every day is as important to the soul, to the revelation of the soul, as what you parents did to you, or what you were like when you were five or ten. Every move you make, every bite you get, every word you say, is inventing yourself. We think the soul is already made by what happened early on, and we’re always trying to fix it, to adjust it. But suppose I’m making it now, as I talk?

Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing. This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak. It alone may keep us from delusions.

Our consciousness today is less mystic than heroic, and we need incantations to summon Hypnos or Hermes to help us drop off to sleep, a ritual of prayer, toothbrushing and teddy bear, of masturbation, food cramming, and the late show, of nightcap and sleeping pill. The basic bedtime story of our culture is that to sleep is to dream and to dream is to enter the House of the Lord of the Dead, where our complexes lie in wait. We do not go gentle into that good night.

No friend or animal wants to be interpreted, even though it may cry for understanding.

And if I write, I’m burning inside, and freezing outside.