Forrest Webber

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” 

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” 

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.”

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

“You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.”

“Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.”

“The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”

“Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” 

“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”

“There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.”

“The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.”

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” 

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” 

“We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”

“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. 

Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. 

Having a sense of humor saves you.” 

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

“One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.”

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

“Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself… The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises… If you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing… The demon that you swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and it’s spectacular.”

“Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive. […] But love bears all things. […] Love itself is pain, you might say – the pain of being truly alive.”

“Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.”

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”

“The specific psychological difficulties of the dreamer frequently are revealed with touching simplicity and force. “

“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had though to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

“One has only to know and trust, and ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side.”

“Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married…”

“The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, ‘Man is the sick animal.’ Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?”

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off…. the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.”

“Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness.”

“But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” 

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” 

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” 

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” 

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” 

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” 

The Journey

“…it is a great and surprising discovery when we find that what we had supposed to be the final peak is nothing but the first step in a very long climb. “

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.” 

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.” 

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” 

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” 

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” 

“The capacity for directed thinking I call intellect; the capacity for passive or undirected thinking I call intellectual intuition.”

“A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”

“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.” 

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.”

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”

“I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal.”

“The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” 

“Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.”

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.”

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

“Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.”

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

“A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.”

“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.”

“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.” 

“Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ” 

“Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.”

“The highest, most decisive experience is to be alone with one’s own self. You must be alone to find out what supports you, when you find that you can not support yourself. Only this experience can give you an indestructible foundation.”

“Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found by experience.”

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” 

“Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.”

“Every living soul has different talents, different desires, different faculties. Be yourself, for even if you deceive the entire world, you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.”

“The forms which the experience takes in each individual may be infinite in their variations, but they are all variants of certain central types, and these occur universally. They are the primordial images.”