The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 1
Context: Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
“Oh would some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us.”
To a Louse, st. 8 (1786) http://www.poetry-online.org/burns_to_a_louse.htm
Variant: O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
Source: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns
Context: O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us
An' ev'n Devotion
Source: The Power of Positive Thinking
General, The Insulted and the Injured (1861)
