“Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.” Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus

I came looking, and I found out how to look.

"O, how oft is kindness undervalued! With gentle care, thou mayst imprint 'pon the heart a mark eternal." “Truth’s A Dog" - AlternativeShakespeare

”Wisdom speaks, though fools must die.” “Truth’s A Dog" – AlternativeShakespeare

"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own."

Had the realization the past few months after hearing endless stories of people who now have friends, lovers, husbands, wives, using ChatGPT to speak for them, even about the most intimate topics. I have heard people share about the loss of critical thinking and loss of

“God has entrusted me with myself. No man is free who is not master of himself. A man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things. The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.”

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.

"Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now."

The past will visit you in the present, If you respond as you did in the past, the circle continues forever. -Zen teaching

I just started a Substack! You can subscribe to it here thealternativeself.substack.com/?r=2gk77b&utm_…

Jung

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard

Your unconscious holds the imprints of your earliest experiences, the survival patterns you didn’t choose but that shaped how you move through the world.

The ego longs for certainty. It wants guarantees, assurances, maps, and safety. Awakening offers none of these. Instead, it strips away illusions until you are left with the raw immediacy of this moment—uncertain, groundless, yet infinitely alive.

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” ― Carl Jung [ Art • “Mourning” by Tom Roberts ]

“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them”

Murray Stein on how Jung chose to listen to 'the spirit of the depths' rather than the 'spirit of the time' — something we could all perhaps learn from.