Later Years
Toward the end of his life, many colleagues and admirers asked Groddeck to form a society that would promote his ideas. To this request, he would laugh and reply:
Disciples like their master to stay put, whereas I should think anyone a fool who wanted me to say the same thing tomorrow as I said yesterday. If you really want to be my follower, look at life for yourself and tell the world honestly what you see.
In a talk called Who is it who knows there is no Ego? the zen philosopher Alan Watts said that when people came to Groddeck for analysis, he would give them massage, and when they came to him for massage, he would give them analysis. "He was a completely wonderful man because everybody felt calmed by him. They felt an atmosphere of implicit faith in nature and especially in your own inner nature. No matter what, there is a wisdom inside you which may seem absurd, but you have to trust it." Watts mentions that Hermann Graf Keyserling, the Lithuanian philosopher, said that nobody has ever reminded him more of Lao Tse than Groddeck.
Read more about this topic: Georg Groddeck
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)