Quotes About Transformation

Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.

But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

Revolution is an amateur thing for almost everybody;

Robert A. Heinlein

Freedom is a hard habit to break.

It's not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet.

In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life.

To honor and accept one's own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.

The only hope for healing is to offer a better form of ecstasy, to upgrade so the addict will give up the stupid one.

Often, when new growth occurs, the most dreadful things seem to happen, but then we see that they were exactly what was required.

The gold is related to our higher calling, and this can be hard to accept at certain stages in life. Ignoring the gold can be as damaging as ignoring the dark side of the psyche, and some people may suffer a severe shock or illness before they learn how to let the gold out. Indeed, this kind of intense experience my be necessary to show us that an important part of us is lying dormant or unused.

Perhaps one of the greatest jokes of my life is that I first went to India to be spiritualized, and I came home humanized.

It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

When it is time for growth, the old ways and the old habits must welcome the new. The old way seems to hinder the new growth at every point, but if you persevere, this way will bring a new consciousness to birth.

Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

How to evolve? Read my book Prometheus Rising, and do all the exercises in that. There are a lot of exercises. It will keep you busy for at least a year. And if at the end of that year you haven't evolved, write me a letter of complaint, and I'll try to write a better book.

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal stage.

Dr. Isaac Asimov notes in his Genetic Code that there seems to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new scientific principle and the transformation of the world by that principle.

And that ended the broadcast. The next time I saw him was less than a week later and he obviously hadn't had his shot for the day. He came over to me in a coffee shop and the transformation was shocking. The Buddha-like eyes were frantic, the voice had a whine, and "facts" now had a very emotional meaning for him.

As we said at the beginning, the bedrock claim of existentialism holds that existence precedes essence, or we have no essence. Like electrons, we jump from one information system to another, and only those who have not looked closely believe that one essence remains constant through all transformations.

My good friend Joel Fort, M.D., a rare bird who is both a psychiatrist and a sociologist, repeatedly tells me, when I recount such tales to him, that there is no scientific proof of cause-and-effect LSD influence in these transformations. "There is no proof," he repeats, "that a drug alone causes such changes. All the evidence suggests, rather, that the ideas that are fashionable in the drug-using world are the causative factor in such conversions.

Behind the Arab influence, it is now agreed by historians of mysticism, was an Indian tradition known as Tantra – the yoga of touch, which includes the yoga of sex and inspired the famous erotic temples that every American tourist photographs to astonish his friends. It is within Tantrism that we must seek the transformation by which this sexual mysticism evolved from naive fertility magic (a rite to make the crops grow) and became a form of consciousness expansion.