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Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'

Robert Bly

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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Attention
Associated
Doesn
Masculine
Power
Feminine
Evolve
Sufis
Longing
Sufi
Wine
Vertical
Divine
Imply
Call
Hierarchy

More quotes by Robert Bly

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Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
Robert Bly
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
Robert Bly
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In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.
Robert Bly
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One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
Robert Bly
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Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
Robert Bly
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
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To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
Robert Bly