Quotes About Numinous

I've begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives. Hayes added, "I would not recommend it to young people.

Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives. By

So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.

there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room—the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.

Like all numinous contents, they have a tendency to self-amplification, that is to say they form the nuclei for an aggregation of synonyms. These

In earlier ages, as instinctive concepts welled up in the mind of man, his conscious mind could no doubt integrate them into a coherent psychic pattern. But the "civilized" man is no longer able to do this. His "advanced" consciousness has deprived itself of the means by which the auxiliary contributions of the instincts and the unconscious can be assimilated. These organs of assimilation and integration were numinous symbols, held holy by common consent.

In my opinion, faith does not exclude thought (which is man's strongest weapon), but unfortunately many believers seem to be afraid of science (and incidentally of psychology) that they turn a blind eye to the numinous psychic powers that forever control man's fate. We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer.

The archetype, as a glance at the history of religious phenomena will show, has a characteristically numinous effect, so that the subject is gripped by it as though by an instinct. What is more, instinct itself can be restrained and even overcome by this power, a fact for which there is no need to advance proofs.

All of the Cyclades are numinous islands, but Delos lies like a poem in the sea. She washed and cradled the archpoet Apollo and first took him for god.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try and conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. I

Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.

Put a horse in an empty meadow, and the meadow becomes animate. Put a saola, even a saola you cannot see, in a forest, and the forest, as though it held a unicorn, acquires an energy that cannot be named. It becomes numinous; it gains the pull of gravity, the weight of water, the float of a feather.

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

I've read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does.

The sinister is always the unintelligible, the impressive, the numinous. Wherever something divine appears, we begin to experience fear. . . . Everything that has to do with salvation possesses, among other things, a sinister, unfamiliar character; it always includes the superhuman. It is a specifically human trait to find joy in destruction. —ADOLF GUGGENBUHL-CRAIG

Meritocracy is a sacred cause, not profane. It is numinous. Meritocracy is about the glory and highest aspirations of the human race, not about letting people run around doing their own thing regardless of everyone else, and fretting over which hamburger to choose. If that's all you want from life, you might as well go and live in the jungle.

The Tao te Ching never speaks of a transcendent God or God. Its central focus is the Tao or Way, conceived of as a mysterious and numinous unity, infinite and eternal, underlying all things and sustaining them. But there is a profound religious reverence and respect for the Tao, and an acceptance of the need for human submission to the Tao. In this sense the Tao is discussed much in the same spirit as Pantheism discusses the awesomeness of the Universe.