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Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Rene Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wi..
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Gary Lachman |
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I take it from Colin Wilson, who in his own work explored the evolutionary potential of imagination. Imagination, he said, is 'the ability to grasp realities that are not immediately present'. Not an escape from reality, or a substitute for it, but a deeper engagement with it. We could also say that imagination is simply our ability to grasp reality, or even, in some strange way, to create it, or at least to collaborate in its creation.
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Gary Lachman |
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Because it feels lost, bewildered, unsure of itself, the conscious ego"--our left brain--"searches obsessively for meaning." In the process "it has achieved more in three thousand years of bicameral consciousness than in the previous million years of inner unity." Wilson"
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Gary Lachman |
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By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals--Freud was their psychologist of choice--but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections--his "so-called autobiography"--Jung was part of a canon of "alternative" thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Casta..
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Gary Lachman |