MORE WORDS TO LIVE BY: THE UNCONSCIOUS

"I believe in man's unconscious, the deep spring from which comes his power to communicate and to love. For me, all art is a combination of these powers; art is nothing to me if it does not make contact between the creator and the perceiver on an unconscious level. Let us say that love is the way we have of communication personally in the deepest way. What art can do is to extend this communication, magnify it, and carry it to vastly greater numbers of people. In this it needs warm core, a hidden heating element...I believe in art for the warmth and love it carries within it."
-Leonard Bernstein


"From the experimental point of view, reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acqired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know oneself; no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows. By this individualization of himself in the depths of himself, the living element, which heretofore had been spread out and divided over a diffuse circle of perceptions and activities, we constituted for the first time as a center in the form of a point at which all the impressions and experieces knit themselves together and fuse into a unity that is conscious of its own organization.

"The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and invention, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love -- all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed center as it explodes onto itself."
-Teilhard de Chardin

These two quotes come to me as I sit day after day working with people in hypnosis and I am exquisitely aware that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. It is the phenomenon of double consciousness -- the self observing the self as it experiences itself ..