Patrick Harpur > Quotes

“Know this: I, Mercurius, have here set down a full, true and infallible account of the Great Work. But I give you fair warning that unless you seek the true philosophical gold and not the gold of the vulgar, unless you heart is fixed with unbending intent on the true Stone of the Philosophers, unless you are steadfast in your quest, abiding by God’s laws in all faith and humility and eschewing all vanity, conceit, falsehood, intemperance, pride, lust and faint-heartedness, read no farther lest I prove fatal to you. For I am the watery venomous serpent who lies buried at the earth’s centre; I am the fiery dragon who flies through the air. I am the one thing necessary for the whole Opus. I am the spirit of metals, the fire which does not burn, the water which does not wet the hands. If you find the way to slay me you will find the philosophical mercury of the wise, even the White Stone beloved of the Philosophers. If you find the way to raise me up again, you will find the philosophical sulphur, that is, the Red Stone and Elixir of Life. Obey me and I will be your servant; free me and I will be your friend. Enslave me and I am a dangerous enemy; command me and I will make you mad; give me life and you will die.”
― Patrick Harpur, Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

“What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick by brick, to shut out colour and light and prevent us from flying.”
― Patrick Harpur, A Complete Guide to the Soul

“Throughout their lives W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung sought out precedents for, and affinities with, their visionary — their daimonic — standpoints. Between them they uncovered and studied just about every major proponent of our tradition. This is not surprising, because it is a feature of the tradition that it threads together all who discover it, to form a series of historical links. The alchemists called it the Aurea Catena, the Golden Chain; and to grasp one link is to be connected to all the others.”
― Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld

“The paradox is that we can only truly love each other when we also love something beyond each other.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“The trick is to cultivate “double vision” … A sense of metaphor, of translation - of two worlds interpenetrating - must be maintained. But this is also the essential movement of the imagination. We see through the literal world to the shape-shifting Otherworld behind.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Our souls do not change in time; they reveal more and different and opposite views of themselves, just as the prima materia does in the course of its transmutation into the Stone.”
― Patrick Harpur, Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

“The more we realize our selves, the less they seem to be our selves, as if the world-soul merely wishes to reflect itself through our eyes. The less self-important we are, the more important we are as selves, with a unique perspective on the cosmos.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“However much we wish the soul’s path to be straight, upward, and ascending, it is more likely to be meandering, full of regressions, downward turns, and backward glances.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Death is a portal into that greater reality that can already be glimpsed in this world as an imaginative experience of the Otherworld.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled - and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Each of us is an individual manifestation of the collective world-soul … we are also and paradoxically contained by the world-soul, like droplets in the ocean.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“We are more like a many-faceted whole, and it is our task in the course of a lifetime to realize each facet of our selves - a journey that is more likely to be downward, circular, and labyrinthine than upward, onward, and straight.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Death is not the opposite of life but of birth - life is a continuous realm out of which we are born; that (as Plato says) we can dimly remember during our existence; and to which we return when we die - to that totality of life compared to which mortal existence seems but a dreamlike fragment.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Ideologies can only ever hope to change our lifestyles; it takes soul to change our lives.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“We are constantly distilling our selves out of ourselves like fountains that gush from underground wellsprings, flash briefly in the sun, and return to their source.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“We cannot solve mysteries - we can only enter into them; and then it is we who are solved or dissolved - transformed in such a way that we see the “problem” quite differently”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Soul is what turns ordinary events into experiences; what imparts to the passing moment depth, connection, and resonance … The effect is unmistakable: an experience of stillness in our heads and, in our hearts, a fullness … Soul is what is transmitted and received in the experience that we call love.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“The task of the human soul is simply to return from its exile in our shadowy, less-than-real material world to an ecstatic union with the One Source of all reality.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“There are many other worlds - but they are all in this one.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Thymos has been assimilated into the robust ego-consciousness of Western man who believes in no reality other than his own.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination

“The way of soul, we notice, is downward rather than the upward flight of the mystic.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“The unconscious reflects back at us the face we show to it.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Emotion and intellect, matter and spirit, body and soul, One and Many, male and female, human and divine, freedom and necessity - all the contradictions of our fractured existence are most marvelously woven together in the wedding of soul and spirit, which preserves our twofoldness right into the heart of the One.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“We are unaware of reality, claim the Romantics, except in moments of imaginative vision.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination

“The idea of imagination implies deep participation and the harnessing of real desires in order to effect self-transformation”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“We cultivate soul by seeking depth, interiority, and connectedness - in short, by exercising imagination.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Our waking consciousness, so contained within our heads, so ego-centered, so floodlighted, makes the dream seem dim and ill-defined. It naturally flees from the light and from a consciousness that would grab it, badger it for subliminal messages, interpret it, handcuff it, and interrogate it for its secret. If, however, we were to cultivate a more daimonic consciousness, we could slide more easily into dreams, adapt to them, changing shape if necessary, and so return to wakefulness with full memory of our otherworldly sojourn. We might even learn to let the dream surface while we are awake, for dreaming goes on all the time - it is nothing other than soul’s imagining.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“As part of the Soul of the World we are part of a cosmic dance of which it is meaningless to ask the purpose and meaning - because it is all purpose and meaning.”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul

“Imagination thrives on mystery”
― Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul