For pleasure/growth, below is what I’ve been reading lately. I’ll not go back in time and post my entire library as there are hundreds of books. This has been one of the most important parts of life for me.
Definitely a recovering Puer in me
Another of von Franz, excellent analysis of The Little Prince and other stories. There is an eternal child in me, to be sure…
Asked and answered
Philosophical novel, asks and answers a large number of questions. Or rather points towards the answers as these are the truly cursed questions, the unanswerable. Ones I’ve wrestled with the…
A fun one! Not without meaning.
Everyone has a bit of Jekyll in them. Everyone a bit of Hyde. Timeless I think given humanity’s inner and outer struggle with identification of and with good vs evil…
Art requires both acceptance and rejection
Again, Camus, really awesome work! It is no wonder you won the Nobel for literature just one year after publication. To think that the works of Camus (among others, Nietzsche, Jung, etc.) had been in circulation for almost 50 years during my Christian belief and pretend leadership in college astounds me. Though I think it was important to go through “as if”…
Awe is the only proper attitude
My second of Von Franz’s. She was the co-founder of the original Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, perhaps Jung’s most famous student and colleague, and certainly the preeminent on interpretation of fairy tales among other topics. Touching the relationship with my own anima is guaranteed while reading her analysis…
Classic on love. What it is and how to.
My first reading of Eric Fromm’s. Published in 1956. Bits about homosexuality and allusions to gender norms of the time made me look! Minor distractions really. I believe I came across this googling something like ‘best fucking books ever written about love…
No to philosophical suicide. Yes to dissonance in the extreme.
How did I get here? Serendipity. On a bookshelf in my office is a pewter statue of Sisyphus rolling his ball up the infamous hill. It was to commemorate my retirement from one work life and the entering of another with unforeseen successes and failures. The eternal struggle between efforting and finding meaning…
Acausal connecting principle between external events and internal phenomena. Also ESP. The mean, the average, is by definition not the exceptional. The outliers are more interesting.
How did way lead me to this again? There are so many possibilities. Instead of trying to recall the most significant or the exact moment which catalyzed my purchase, let me just say I had been wanting to understand Jung’s meaning of the title from his own hand. Because once I’d heard that it was not used appropriately in…
Wild/Excellent material for the masculine. Sorcery/spiritual & energetic mastery.
The lessons of Don Juan. First book of Carlos’s I read was madness to me. Hilarious at times as he recounted (as best as one can I imagine) his direct experiences of shamanic drug induced journeys…