Josh Anderson > Recent Status Updates

The chapter about his time with Freud is riveting. When he’s speaking about reading Nietzsche and exchanging ideas with Freud, it’s a bit surreal. I suppose I’ve put them all up on mythological pedestals.

Now I’m not so sure Mitya murdered his father and I went from hating him to kind of loving him.

I hate Mitya! If there is any of him in me, may he die and never come back!

Thoughts and teachings of the Elder Zosima

"There is every reason to believe that Nietzsche turned away from Christianity because the Christians, taught by Aristotle and the Stoics, completely forgot the primordial "commanding" (jubere) and remembered only the "obedience" (parere) which follows it."

As long as you have a cursory understanding of the Old Testament and Socrates, you'd love this book. Shestov writes with incredible clarity and looks at the Fall in Genesis in a way I've never seen, influenced by Nietzsche, but unfettered by will and instead tied to it with the pater noster.

This feels so wrong, yet it feels so right.

**SLIGHT SPOILER** it's starting to get a little miraculous!

I love how the chapters are not named, like in the last book I read by him, but instead the numbers of the chapters become very important to the subjects he is talking about. I just noticed this because Chapt. 7 is all about the musical law of Octaves, which is a scale of do(1) re(2) mi(3) fa(4) so(5) la(6) ti(7) do(8 or 1) and follows with an absolutely astounding chapter (8) about consciousness/sleep and awakening.

"People do not understand that sincerity must be learned. They imagine that to be sincere or not to be sincere depends upon their desire or decision. But how can a man be sincere with himself when in actual fact he sincerely does not see what he ought to see in himself?"

"I do not know what you call 'cosmic consciousness,'" said G., "it is a vague and indefinite term; anyone can call anything he likes by it. In most cases what is called 'cosmic consciousness' is simply fantasy, associative daydreaming connected with intensified work of the emotional center. Sometimes it comes near to ecstasy but most often it is merely a subjective emotional experience on the level of dreams."

This book is like traveling to all Seven Wonders of the World, with Indiana Jones' father's diary, If Indy's dad were a bit more apostolic.

Beautiful visions of the Tarot.

"Edith became the secret patron of Irish writer and expatriate James Joyce. She provided him an anonymous monthly stipend that he picked up at a local Zurich bank. When he found out who his patron was, he came to the hotel to thank her. There is no record of their meeting, but Joyce later said she cut off her support when he refused to go into analysis with Jung or one of his disciples."

"Rockefeller money introduced Jung to the English-speaking world and helped bring him the worldwide fame has today."

"Armed with their new knowledge, they entered the psych wards and found exactly what Jung told them to look for: ancient pagan gods in the unconscious of their patients...And the ones they found most often in the most "regressed" psychotic patients--just as Jung said they would--were various pre-Christian solar deities: sun gods."