Numinous Quotes

• Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Facts, Morality

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Problem of Pain”, p.11, HarperCollins UK

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• The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.

  Carl Jung

  Real, Character, Neurosis

  Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Letters”

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• As soon as the dialogue between two people touches on something fundamental, essential, numinous, and a certain rapport is felt, it gives rise to a phenomenon which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly called participation mystique. It is an unconscious identity in which two individual psychic spheres interpenetrate to such a degree that it is impossible to say what belongs to whom.

  Carl Jung

  Psychics, Two, People

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1964). “Civilization in transition”

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• A tree is a self: it is 'unseen shaping' more than it is leaves or bark, roots or cellulose or fruit ... What this means is that we must address trees as we must address all things, confronting them in the awareness that we are in the presence of numinous mystery.

  Brian Swimme

  Mean, Self, Roots

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• The years... when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then.

  Carl Jung

  Years, Important, Details

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• I believe that used responsibly and in a mature way, the entheogens mediate access to the numinous dimensions of existence, have a great healing and transformative potential, and represent a very important tool for spiritual development.

  Stanislav Grof

  Spiritual, Believe, Healing

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• The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.

  Terence McKenna

  Animal, Mind, Depth

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• Human language has a vocabulary suited to our daily needs and functions: the shape of any human language maps approximately to the needs and activities of our mundane lives. But few would deny that there is another dimension of human existence which transcends the mundane: call it the soul, the spirit: it is that part of the human frame which sees the shimmer of the numinous.

  Julian Burnside

  Communication, Vocabulary, Media

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• Every being has its own interior, its self, its mystery, its numinous aspect. To deprive any being of this sacred quality is to disrupt the total order of the universe. Reverence will be total or it will not be at all. The universe does not come to us in pieces any more than a human individual stands before us with some part of his/her being.

  Thomas Berry

  Integrity, Self, Order

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• prayer is whenever we consciously try to get in contact with the numinous, the ineffable, the marvelous.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Prayer, Trying, Ineffable

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• Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

  Marilynne Robinson

  Ordinary, Ordinary Things

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• We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

  David Eagleman

  Running, Cells, Years

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Expression, Definitions

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• Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

  Mary Karr

  Running, Wish, Full Potential

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• It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?

  Carl Sagan

  Couple, Lying, Reading

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• We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we're going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic" that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, Giving, Laughing

  Source: www.wanliss.com

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• Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Glowing, Hot And Cold

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• If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

  Grant Morrison

  Spiritual, Ocean, Self

  Grant Morrison (2011). “Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero”, p.415, Random House

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• I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'

  Oliver Sacks

  Weed, Atheist, Marijuana

  "Oliver Sacks, Exploring How Hallucinations Happen". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. November 6, 2012.

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• For Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-1674), one of the sanest men who ever lived, to see the world with the eyes of innocence, and so to see it pervaded by a numinous glory, is to see things as they truly are, and to recognize creation as the mirror of God's infinite beauty.

  David Bentley

  Eye, Men, Infinite Beauty

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• Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

  Thomas Berry

  Life, Order, Religion

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• Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

  Robert Hass

  Afternoon, Evening, Blackberries

  "Meditation at Lagunitas" l. 28 (1979)

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• To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

  Stephen Fry

  Spiritual, Essence, Use

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• I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.

  Kate Atkinson

  Rain, Profound, Grace

  Kate Atkinson (2013). “Emotionally Weird: A Novel”, p.277, Macmillan

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