Quote of the Day (2/2/09)

[A] cat lives its life in what psychology calls avoidance behavior. It tends to move around a suspicious object. It sniffs, it has its ears up, on the ready. It's superstitious. So, the kind of belief I want to explore and that Christianism abhors is superstition. That's where the daimones—what Jung called the little people—are very much alive. We feel their power in all sorts of little avoidance behaviors, little superstitions, little rituals, little secret neurotic compulsions. Superstitions keep the world alive for us—ladders might fall, cats bring bad luck. But not just these collective superstitions: I mean your own private ones about your bed, about the night, about your diet . . . wherever there is something a little uncanny, just outside the borders of consciousness. Superstitions bring you special reports. They are your foreign correspondents from the alien people across the border.
--James Hillman, Inter Views