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[ by Charles Cameron — red bull expands on pascal, takes us deeper into instinctive / archetypal thought ]
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I came across a powerful paragraph in Beyond a joke, a piece witth the enticing subtitle, “The brain holds many secrets that admen would love to learn – not least, how to change behaviour. Rory Sutherland explores how comedy rouses the grey matter.” Powerful, in that it connects, at least for me, with at least three major quotes from “wise men of old” from here and beyond:

The reason for this glaring discrepancy is that the part of the brain used to write economic papers is not the part of the brain that chooses a drink. The part of my brain that causes me to chug a can of Red Bull on the way home from work has a logic all of its own.

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You remember my old DoubleQuotes format?

I used it to make various kinds of connections beyween two quotes? Well, I’ve come to feel its clumsy visually, takes up too much space — breaks the train of thought it’s embedded in rather than illuminating it? But the concept, the holding together of two ideas in close juxtaposition, still seems extraordinarily useful to me.

So here are elements of that para, juxtaposed with sayings from Blaise Pascal, Christ, and the Tao Te Ching — quite a variety of “wise” sources:

The heart has its reasons reason knows not of.

The part of my brain that causes me to chug a can of Red Bull on the way home from work has a logic all of its own.

The part of the brain used to write economic papers is not the part of the brain that chooses a drink.

The way that can be named is not the true way.

The part of the brain used to write economic papers is not the part of the brain that chooses a drink.

In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.

Christ, Lao Tze, and Pascal! If the correlations are as powerful as I take them to be, and even if you omit the “many mansions” one which is I’ll admit bit of a stretch, that’s a power packed para.

And the “many mansions”? It may be a bit of a stretch, but I think it adds a certain audacity to the whole — jazzes up what’s alreadt strong with an intriguing elan — what do you think?

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The Bollingen classic:

Jolande Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung

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I mean, please comment, eh?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2018 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Charles Cameron, christianity, Doublequotes, jung, pascal, tao, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.