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A Responsibility To Awe
Still waiting For Godot
Now, we have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul — the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill — this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but.” In the ritual they are near the Godhead; they are even divine. Think of the priest in the Catholic Church, who is in the Godhead: he carries himself to the sacrifice on the altar; he offers himself as the sacrifice. Do we do it? Where do we know that we do it? Nowhere! Everything is banal, everything is “nothing but”; and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war. They are all glad when there is a war: they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen — something bigger than ourselves!”
~C.G Jung
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The Guiding Daimon
Ficino warned against living in conflict with the daimon lest you succumb to the worst kind of soul sickness. As an example, he says you should never decide where to live without taking into full consideration the demands of the daimon, which may appear as an intuitive attraction or inhibition.
