Quotes About Transformation

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

The queen of the underworld, the goddess of chaos, is also the force that eternally renews.

If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate's brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position. 8 Its original brain just isn't sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

creates habitable chaos out of order

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It's stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities.

To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small

The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism,

The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms.

Uma transformação voluntária de morte e renascimento – a mudança necessária para a adaptação em face de coisas terríveis – é por isso uma solução para a rigidez, potencialmente fatal, da falsa certeza absoluta, da ordem em excesso e da rotina.

El futuro trae consigo lo desconocido; por tanto, la inflexibilidad y la falta de voluntad para cambiar traen la certeza de la extinción.

What shall I do with the most difficult of questions? Consider them the gateway to the path of life.

No te enfrentes al caos para transformarlo en orden, sino que limítate a esperar, sin ningún asomo de ingenuidad o inocencia, a que el caos se desborde y te arrastre.

El punto negro en la parte blanca y el blanco en la parte negra indican la posibilidad de transformación: solo cuando todo parece seguro puede irrumpir lo desconocido de forma brutal e inesperada.

If you're going to insist on bending the world

The totalitarian says, in essence, "You must rely on faith in what you already know." But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.

No tree can grow to Heaven," adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, "unless its roots reach down to Hell."134 Such a statement should give everyone who encounters it pause. There was no possibility for movement upward, in that great psychiatrist's deeply considered opinion, without a corresponding move down. It is for this reason that enlightenment is so rare.

At the beginning of time, according to the great Western tradition, the Word of God transformed chaos into Being through the act of speech. It is axiomatic, within that tradition, that man and woman alike are made in the image of that God. We also transform chaos into Being, through speech. We transform the manifold possibilities of the future into the actualities of past and present. To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being.

You are not only something that is. You are something that is becoming—and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.

Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

The information in our experience is latent, like gold in ore—the case we made in Rule II. It must be extracted and refined with great effort, and often in collaboration with other people, before it can be employed to improve the present and the future.

Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.