Iron John

Highlights

Jung remarked that all successful requests to the psyche involve deals. The psyche likes to make deals. (via) ^rwhi814446843

Exuberance in a child is bad, and at the first sign of it, parents should be severe. Exuberance implies that the wild boy or girl is no longer locked up. (via) ^rwhi814446844

only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women. Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man. Initiators say that boys need a second birth, this time a birth from men. (via) ^rwhi814446845

Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all. (via) ^rwhi814446848

where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community. (via) ^rwhi814446849

Wounds need to be expanded into air, lifted up on ideas our ancestors knew, so that the wound ascends through the roof of our parents’ house and we suddenly see how our wound (seemingly so private) fits into a great and impersonal story. (via) ^rwhi814446850

Look for your other half        who walks always next to you        and tends to be who you aren’t. (via) ^rwhi814446851

The person who gazes in the mirror receives an awareness of his other half, his shadow, or hidden man; (via) ^rwhi814446852

that accepting an initiatory task is more important than succeeding or failing at it. (via) ^rwhi814446853

“Men have been depressed now for many years in their male and resplendent selves, depressed into dejection and almost abjection. (via) ^rwhi814446856

“Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” Whether the fathers are actually darker than they were in the past, they are perceived so, and a son assigns himself the task of redeeming the dark father. (via) ^rwhi814446857

A child has a mood—he or she wants to play, or stay in the room, or be loony. The grownups have bigger moods. The abusive, or depressed, or alcoholic, or workaholic, or crazy parent has an enormous mood, and it is the only mood that counts. The children and the other parent have to adapt to that big mood, serve it, cater to it, sacrifice their mood for that greater one. The King then gets sacrificed—he dies. By the time the child is twelve, he doesn’t really know what his mood is anymore. (via) ^rwhi814446858

Each father inherits thousands of years of cunning and elaborate fatherhood. An apparently weak father can control the entire family from beneath with his silences. (via) ^rwhi814446859

The Destructive Father does not give energy to those in his family but draws it out of them into some black hole he shelters in himself. He draws it out steadily, as the great tyrants we know of draw it from their citizens. (via) ^rwhi814446860

Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden. (via) ^rwhi814446861

Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. (via) ^rwhi814446862

When a person chooses the one thing most precious, it is a serious act. Choosing ends well, but not for the rejected divinities. (via) ^rwhi814446863

choose what you want and then pay for it. (via) ^rwhi814446864

If we choose “the one precious thing”—the object of our desire—then, according to the alchemists, the inner King in us that has been asleep for so many years wakes up. (via) ^rwhi814446865

As long as nothing is clear, as long as we have not chosen whether to be conductor or human, the King—and the Queen—sleeps on. (via) ^rwhi814446866

child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world. (via) ^rwhi814446867

The Twisted side of the Great Mother doesn’t want the boy to grow up because if he does he will pass out of her realm. (via) ^rwhi814446868

We must repeat that it isn’t the personal mother who imprisons the son—she wants him to be free. It is the possessive or primitive side of the Great Mother that keeps him locked up. (via) ^rwhi814446869

We need people to remind men again and again how difficult it is to become a conscious father, and people to remind women how difficult it is to be a conscious mother. (via) ^rwhi814446870

Shame, it is said, is the sense that you are an utterly inadequate person on this planet, and probably nothing can be done about it. Guilt is the sense that you have done one thing wrong, and you can atone for it. (via) ^rwhi814446871

Only when a man’s interior warriors are strong enough can he go into the joy of display. (via) ^rwhi814446875

human self-esteem is a delicate matter, and not to be dismissed as infantile grandiosity. (via) ^rwhi814446876