Jung

"What myth do you live by?" (Jung, 1952)

Muzika

"Only then can you begin to transcend the self – after it has been found, strengthened, repaired, and given direction and meaning."

 

Muzika, E.G. (1990). Evolution, emptiness and the fantasy self. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 30(2), 89-108.

Epstein

"… the ultimate purpose of Buddhist meditation is not to withdraw from the falsely conceived self but to recognize the misconception, thereby weakening its influence."

 

Epstein, M. (1989). Forms of emptiness: Psychodynamic, meditative and clinical perspectives. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 21(1), 61-69.

Greenberg

"Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense ‘supernatural,’ and all systematization of culture have in their end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some way their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count."

 

Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Terror management theory of self-esteem and cultural worldviews: Empirical assessment and conceptual refinements. In M.P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol.29). New York: Academic Press.

Preston

"More senior practitioners report that early ideas of how things are supposed to be evaporated and one is left with just seeing how things are."

 

Preston, D.L. (1981). Becoming a Zen practitioner. Sociological Analysis, 42(1), 47-55.

Preston

"While those interviewed almost unanimously saw ‘all kinds of people’ doing Zen, it was generally agreed that they tend to be more serious than usual and more disappointed with the standard roles and rewards of American society."

 

Preston, D.L. (1981). Becoming a Zen practitioner. Sociological Analysis, 42(1), 47-55.

Kundera

"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -and herein lies its secret- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."

 

Kundera, M. (1980). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Viking Penguin.

Loy

"If the ego-self is the result of consciousness attempting to reflect back upon itself in order to grasp itself, meditation is an exercise in de-reflection. Enlightenment or liberation occurs the moment that the usually automatized reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting go and falling back into the void."

 

Loy, D. (1990). The nonduality of life and death: A Buddhist view of repression. Philosophy East and West, 40(2), 151-174.

Loy

"The Buddhist term for all this is attachment […] [I]t is the need to organize the chaos of life by finding a unifying meaningsystem that gives us knowledge about the world, and a life program, telling us both what is and what we should do."

 

Loy, D. (1990). The nonduality of life and death: A Buddhist view of repression. Philosophy East and West, 40(2), 151-174.

Lifton

"There is a clear sense of the relationship between awareness of death and a delineated self. The second is impossible without the first. Even prior to the disturbing syllogism, "If death exists, then I will die," there is an earlier one: "Since ‘I’ was born and will die, ‘I’ must exist"."

 

Lifton, R.J. (1979). The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. (p. 69)