Non Fiction Authors

"Being absolute, the supreme Principle is ipso facto infinite; the masculine body accentuates the first aspect, and the feminine body the second. On the basis of these two hypostatic aspects, the divine Principle is the source of all possible perfection; in other words, being the Absolute and the Infinite, It is necessarily also Perfection or the Good. Now each of the two bodies, the masculine and the feminine, manifests modes of perfection which their respective gender evokes by definition; indeed, all cosmic qualities are divided into two complementary groups: the rigorous and the gentle, the active and the passive, the contractive and the expansive. The human body is an image of Deliverance: now the liberating way maybe either "virile" or "feminine", although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes, for man (homo, anthropos) is always man; the non-material being that was the primordial androgyne survives in each of us."

"To say that man, and consequently the human body, is "made in the image of God" means a priori that it manifests something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect. What above all distinguishes the human form from animal forms is its direct reference to absoluteness, starting with its vertical posture; as a result, if animal forms can be transcended − and they are so by man, precisely − such could not be the case for the human form; this form marks not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also, and for this very reason, the exit from their condition, or from the samsāra as Buddhists would say. To see man is to see not only the image of God, but also a door open towards bodhi, liberating enlightenment; or, let us say, towards a blessed centering in the divine proximity."

"God has opened a gate in the middle of creation, and this open gate of the world towards God is man; this opening is God’s invitation to look towards Him, to tend towards Him, to persevere with regard to Him, and to return to Him. And this enables us to understand why the gate shuts at death when it has been scorned during life; for to be man means nothing other than to look beyond and to pass through the gate. Unbelief and paganism are whatever turns its back on the gate; on its threshold light and darkness separate. The notion of Hell becomes perfectly clear when we think how senseless it is − and what a waste and a suicide − to slip through the human state without being truly man, that is, to pass God by, and thus to pass our own souls by, as if we had any right to human faculties apart from the return to God, and as if there were any point in the miracle of the human state apart from the end which is prefigured in man himself; or again: as if God had had no motive in giving us an intelligence which discerns and a will which chooses."

"Man is by definition pontifex, "builder of bridges", or "builder of a bridge". For man possesses essentially two dimensions, an outward and an inward; he therefore has the right to both, or else he would not be man, precisely; to speak of a man without surroundings is as contradictory as to speak of a man without a core. On the one hand, we live among the phenomena which surround us and of which we are a part, and on the other hand, our hearts are rooted in God; consequently we must realize as perfect an equilibrium as possible between our life in the world and our life directed toward the Divine. Obviously this second life determines the first and gives it all its meaning; the rights of outwardness depend upon measures which pertain to the inward and which the inward imposes upon us."

"Human intelligence is essentially objective, hence total: it is capable of disinterested judgment, reasoning, assimilating and deifying meditation, with the help of grace. This attribute of objectivity also belongs to the will − it is this attribute that makes it human − and this is why our will is free, in other words capable of self-transcendence, sacrifice, and ascesis; our willing is not inspired by our desires alone, it is inspired fundamentally by the truth, which is separate from our immediate interests. Likewise for our soul, our sensibility, our capacity for loving: this capacity, being human, is by definition objective and thus disinterested in its essence or in its primordial and innocent perfection; it is capable of goodness, generosity, compassion. This means that it is capable of finding its happiness in the happiness of others, and to the detriment of its own satisfactions; likewise, it is capable of finding its happiness above itself, in its celestial personality, which is not yet completely its own. It is from this specific nature, made of totality and objectivity, that the vocation of man derives, together with his rights and his duties."

"The human vocation is to realize that which constitutes man's raison d’être: a projection of God and, therefore, a bridge between earth and Heaven; or a point of view that allows God to see Himself starting from an other-than-Himself, even though this other, in the final analysis, can only be Himself, for God is known only through God."

"One of the proofs of our immortality is that the soul − which is essentially intelligence and consciousness − cannot have an end that is beneath itself, namely matter or the mental reflections of matter; the higher cannot be merely a function of the lower, it cannot be merely a means in relation to what it surpasses. Thus it is intelligence in itself − and with it our freedom − which proves the divine scope of our nature and our destiny. Whether people understand it or not, the Absolute alone is proportionate to the essence of our intelligence."

"One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing; the Absolute alone confers on our intelligence the power to accomplish to the full what it can accomplish and to be wholly what it is. Similarly, in the case of the will, which is no more than a prolongation or complement of the intelligence: the objects it commonly sets out to achieve, or those that life imposes on it, do not measure up to the fullness of its range; only the "divine dimension" can satisfy the thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love."

"It has been said that man is a rational animal; while this formulation is insufficient and ill-sounding, it nonetheless points to an undeniable truth, though in an elliptical fashion, for the rational faculty actually serves to underscore the transcendence of man in relation to the animal. Man is rational because he possesses the Intellect, which by definition has a capacity for the absolute and therefore a sense of the relative; and he possesses the Intellect because he is made "in the image of God", which, moreover, he demonstrates physically by his corporeal form and his cranial form, as well as by his vertical posture, then by language and his productive capacity. Man is a theophany in his form as much as in his faculties."

"The double mission of man: to know the Absolute from the standpoint of the contingent, and to manifest the Absolute within the contingent."

"Objective intelligence, free will, virtuous soul: these are the three prerogatives that constitute man."

"The human being, by his nature, is condemned to the supernatural."

"Moral liberty and intellectual objectivity constitute a priori man’s deiformity."

"Man is a divine manifestation, not in his accidentality and his fallen state, but in his theomorphism and his primordial and principial perfection. He is the "field of manifestation" of the intellect, which reflects the universal Spirit and thereby the divine Intellect; man as such reflects the cosmic totality, the Creation, and thereby the Being of God."

"It is in man’s theomorphic nature that in his capacity as man and in God’s creative intention, he cannot be something fragmentary or incomplete − which cuts short the absurdities of transformist evolution − thus that he must be something which is everything, and would be nothing if it were not everything; and it is in this sense that it has been said that man’s fundamental vocation is to "become what he is"."

"To say that man is "made in the image of God" means that he represents a central and not a peripheral subjectivity, and consequently a subject which, emanating directly from the Divine Intellect, participates in principle in the power of the latter; man can know all that is real, hence knowable, otherwise he would not be that earthly divinity which in fact he is."

"A classic example of a naive dogma is the Biblical story of creation, followed by that of the first human couple: if we are skeptical, we balk at the childishness of the literal meaning; but if we are intuitive − as every man ought to be − we will be sensitive to the irrefutable truths of the images; we feel that we bear these images within ourselves, that they have a universal and timeless validity. The same observation applies to myths and even to fairy tales: in describing principles − or situations − concerning the universe, they describe at the same time psychological and spiritual realities of the soul; and in this sense it can be said that the symbolisms of religion or of popular tradition are a part of our common experience, both on the surface and in depth."

"One must not tire of affirming this: the origin of a creature is not a substance of a material kind, it is a perfect and non-material archetype: perfect, therefore without any need of a transformative evolution; non-material, therefore having its origin in the Spirit, not in matter. Assuredly, there is a trajectory; but this proceeds not from an inert and unconscious substance, but from the Spirit − the matrix of all possibilities − to the earthly result, the creature; and this result issued from the invisible at a cyclic moment when the physical world was still far less separate from the psychic world than in later and progressively more "hardened" periods. When one speaks traditionally of creatio ex nihilo, what is meant, on the one hand, is that creatures do not derive from a pre-existing matter and, on the other, that the "incarnation" of possibilities cannot in any way affect the immutable plenitude of the Principle."

"Original man was not a simian creature barely capable of speaking and standing upright; he was a quasi-immaterial being enclosed in an aura still celestial, but deposited on earth; an aura similar to the "chariot of fire" of Elijah or the "cloud" that enveloped Christ during his ascension. That is to say, our conception of the origin of mankind is based on the doctrine of the projection of the archetypes ab intra; thus our position is that of classical emanationism – in the Neoplatonic or gnostic sense of the term – which avoids the pitfall of anthropomorphism while agreeing with the theological conception of creatio ex nihilo. Evolutionism, for its part, is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps."

"It is the sophists, with Protagoras in the lead, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the "thinkers" properly so-called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with "perceiving" and taking into account that which "is". And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned − Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well − but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit."

"If an ancient writer can give the impression of simplemindedness, this is largely because he did not have to take account of a thousand errors still unknown nor of a thousand possibilities of misinterpretation, and also because there was no need for his dialectic to resemble a Scottish dance between the eggs, seeing that such an author could in a large measure dispense with nuances; words still possessed a freshness and a fullness − or a magic − which it is difficult for us to imagine, living as we do in a climate of verbal inflation."

"It ought to be possible to restore to the word "philosophy" its original meaning: philosophy − the "love of wisdom" − is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which "perceives," and not with reason alone, which "concludes". Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: the philosopher is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. The solution to the problem of knowledge − if there is a problem − could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source − the only one there is − is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such."

"Ordinary monotheistic theologies operate only with the entirely insufficient alternative of "created" and "uncreated": there is for them only God and the world, the Creator and the created, whereas in reality there is first of all the Absolute and the relative, and then within Relativity there is the creative Uncreated − not the Uncreated in itself − and all that is created."

"Theology, founded as it is upon the inevitably antinomic and elliptical − but by no means contradictory or irreconcilable − facts of the sacred Scriptures, is a mental activity that interprets these facts by means of the reason and in relation to a piety that is often more fervent than enlightened; this occasionally results in theories that are doubtless opportune and effective in a given psychological or moral context, but restrictive or even aberrant from the point of view of pure and simple truth, and in any case unacceptable on the plane of metaphysics."

"Theological perspective is characterized extrinsically by its concern with defending conceptual and moral interests, whereas pure metaphysics sets forth the nature of things, while being aware of aspects and points of view."

"Theology on the whole is a philosophical commentary on Revelation − an "inspired" commentary in that it forestalls heresies properly so-called, to the extent this is possible, while at the same time being psychologically and morally opportunistic."

"One may be astonished and even scandalized at the frequency, in religious climates, of more or less unintelligent opinions and attitudes, let it be said without euphemism; the indirect cause of this phenomenon is that religion, the goal of which is to save the largest possible number of souls and not to satisfy the need for causal explanations of an intellectual elite, has no motive for directly addressing the intelligence as such. In keeping with its end and with the capacity of the majority, the religious message is basically addressed to intuition, sentiment, and imagination, and then to the will, and to reason to the extent that the human condition requires it; it informs men of the reality of God, of the immortality of the soul and of their ensuing consequences for man, and it offers man the means of saving himself. It is not, does not wish to be, and cannot be, or offer, anything else, at least not explicitly; for implicitly it offers everything."

"Be aware that you may not be the best judge of what your employees need to do their jobs effectively. Even if you've done the job yourself, someone else may work best with a different set of tools, or in a different setup, because each person is different."

"In my opinion two is the ideal team. Any more and you're in danger of ending up with a committee that spins its wheels and accomplishes nothing."

"You can't literally cram a 25th hour into a 24-hour day. But you can shift activities and priorities so more time is available for essential tasks."

"Without a deadline, the motivation to do a task is small to nonexistent."

"Productive people guard their time more heavily than the gold in Fort Knox."

"Quality improves with effort according to an exponential curve."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"Many people boast of going years without a vacation. But this is a sign of trouble — not commitment."

"One of the greatest satisfactions in life comes from getting things done and knowing you have done them to the best of your ability."

"The successful managers know that the best way for their people to learn and grow is through experience and that means taking chances and making errors."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"Robert Bly said writing a bad poem before breakfast/every day is a good habit./He did it in honor of his old friend Bill Stafford/(who also did it) after Bill died./The poems were never bad, by the way./They were great./There were a lot of them./You could work on them later, after you ate."

"Sometimes the only way we learn to hold on to our deeper knowing is because a stranger jumps out. Then we are forced to fight for what we find dear-fight to be serious about what we are about, fight to get past our superficial spiritual motives, which Robert Bly calls "the desire to feel groovy," fight to hold on to the deeper knowledge, fight to finish what we have begun."

"For lo! the days are hastening on, By prophet-bards foretold, When with the ever-circling years, Comes round the age of gold; When Peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendors fling And the whole world send back the song Which now the angels sing."

"It came upon the midnight clear, That glorious song of old, From Angels bending near the earth To touch their harps of gold; "Peace on the earth, good will to man From Heaven’s all gracious King." The world in solemn stillness lay To hear the angels sing."

"Calm on the listening ear of night Come Heaven’s melodious strains, Where wild Judea stretches far Her silver-mantled plains."

"Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature."

"Christmas, only distinguished from the fifty-two slow Sundays of the year by plum-pudding, roast turkey, and a few bottles of home-made beer..."

"I make no apologies for being egotistical."

"We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters- poor fools!"

"Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive Hope, whispered in my ear that life was long with much by and by, and in that by and by my dream-life would be real. So on I went with that gleaming lake in the distance beckoning me to come and sail on its silver waters, and Inexperience, conceited, blind Inexperience, failing to show the impassable pit between it and me."

"Summer is fiendish, and life is a curse, I said in my heart. What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it were a few barren narrow ledges, and on these, by exerting ourselves so that the force wears off our finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two, and then hurls us off into outer darkness and oblivion, perhaps to endure worse torture than this."

"Provided a woman is beautiful allowance will be made for all her shortcomings. She can be unchaste, vapid, untruthful, flippant, heartless, and even clever; so long as she is fair to see men will stand by her, and as men, in this world, are "the dog on top", they are the power to truckle to. A plain woman will have nothing forgiven her. Her fate is such that the parents of uncomely female infants should be compelled to put them to death at their birth."