Use Native American Drums For Spiritual Journeys ... Indian leaders in North America history have all used drums in various ways to interact with a higher power known to most as the Great Spirit. To Native people, Indian drums are much more than just decorations or beautiful musical instruments...
Under equal conditions, the feminine psyche is closer to potential contraction than the masculine; for the simple reason that the woman has a more centripetal, integrated, and elastic mind. As we noted, the function charged with giving the mind its structure and cohesion is the attention. A highly unified mind presupposes a highly concentrated manner of attention. One could say that the feminine mind tends to have a single axis of attention, which at each phase of her life is set toward one thing alone.... In contrast to the concentric structure of the feminine mind there are always epicenters in that of the man. The more masculine one is, in a spiritual sense, the more his mind is disjointed in separate compartments. One part of us is deeply dedicated to politics or business, while another devotes itself to intellectual curiosity and another to sexual pleasure. There is lacking, then, a tendency toward one unified gravitation of the attention. In fact, the contrary predominates, which leads to dissociation.
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare—never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)