“The inner and outer egos do not have a cementlike relationship, but can interrelate with each other in almost infinite fashions, still preserving the reality of physical experience, but varying the accents upon it by the inner areas of subjective life. Even the bare-seeming facts of history are experienced far differently according to the symbolic content within which they are inevitably immersed. A war, in your terms, can be practically experienced as a murderous disaster, a triumph of savagery – or as a sublime victory of the human spirit over evil.”
“I want to mention here, however, that man is not basically endowed with “warlike characteristics”. He does not naturally murder. He does not naturally seek to destroy his own life or [the lives of] others. There is no battle for survival – but while you project such an idea upon natural reality, then you will read nature, and your own experience with it, in that fashion.
“Man does have an instinct and a desire to live, and he has an instinct and a desire to die. The same applies to other creatures. In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth.”
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