“We suffer from a repression of the sublime,” wrote the Italian psychiatrist and polymath Roberto Assagioli. The sentence arrives like a wake-up call. Repression today rarely announces itself with force. It suffuses the character of our days. The thumb learns the motion of the endless feed; the eye learns to skim; language bends toward metrics and performance. We wake to a screen, we fall asleep to a screen, and between those two glowing surfaces we find ourselves in an economy of distraction that trains us to react rather than to receive. Wonder asks for lingering, yet the system favors speed. The sublime withers through neglect.
Assagioli (1888–1974) saw this hunger long before the age of digital notifications. Where Freud mapped the lower reaches of impulse and fear, Assagioli studied the neglected heights. He wrote of a “higher unconscious,” a region of intuition, love, and creative insight, and drew his egg-shaped diagram of the psyche to show the whole field at once: lower, middle, and higher zones; the field of consciousness; the personal self; and the deeper Self shining like a star beyond. He warned that our noblest capacities can go unused until they feel absent. Perhaps “repression” in his sentence is a figure of speech; what we live is closer to atrophy, a faculty that falls silent through lack of exercise. We fail to recognize wonder when it appears. A child’s astonishment at first snow, the hush before music in a concert hall, the sudden clarity that comes in grief: Such moments still visit us; the grammar to hold them has thinned.
Psychosynthesis was his answer to this poverty of depth. He founded an institute in Florence in 1926 and offered practices that sound disarmingly simple: attention, imagination, choice. He taught disidentification, the sober art of noticing that thoughts and moods pass through us without defining us. “We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified,” he wrote. “We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves.” The aim was harmony, an inner accord that lets the whole person speak.
Among the instruments he trusted, the aphorism held a special place. On the surface, it is a small form; in practice, it works like a tool. A true aphorism compresses experience into a sentence that continues to work after the reading ends. How does such a fragment of language work? What makes it a technology rather than mere verbal display?
His method was patient and practical. One selected a single saying and held it inwardly, to let it steep in silence. “Choose one thought,” he advised, “and let it dwell in you.” The practice required no special posture or breathing technique, no initiation into esoteric doctrine. It asked only that one return, again and again, to the same assemblage of words. Through repetition and repose, the phrase begins to unfold from within. What seems clear at first reading acquires new dimensions; what appeared simple proves inexhaustible. The mind grows quiet; the heart listens. Gradually, the aphorism starts to act, altering perception, easing inner dissonance, tuning awareness to a higher pitch. Like the Sufi dhikr or the Zen koan, it serves as key and as threshold, opening a passage between word and silence.
This was spiritual technology in the precise sense: a way to transform consciousness through deliberate, repeatable practice. Assagioli saw no conflict between the language of technique and the reality of grace. The seed germinates through conditions we provide—soil and water and darkness. The life within it is a gift.
Such work situates Assagioli in the company of the contemplatives. He read widely in mystical literature and admired the wisdom traditions that treat language as vessel. During the 1930s and 1940s, Assagioli’s life narrowed and deepened. The fascist regime distrusted his pacifism and his links to international colleagues; so he spent several weeks in prison, time that turned into a kind of enforced retreat. After his release he returned to Florence and, in those quiet years, began reading the Sufi poets in translation: Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Hafez. Their verses spoke to the very synthesis he sought, a psychology large enough for spirit.
In his notebooks, one finds marginal notes in Italian beside Arabic words, sketches of the maqāmāt, the stations of the soul, and even a careful attempt to copy the Ninety-Nine Names of the divine. The idea that wisdom could live inside a single, radiant phrase fascinated him. The Sufis called such distilled insight hikma, brief sayings that hold the aftertaste of revelation. He saw how these utterances polish awareness the way prayer beads polish with use, until the mind itself becomes smooth enough to reflect light. The parallel to his own therapeutic aim was clear: awakening what already sleeps within and guiding the seeker from dispersion toward harmony.
He taught that genuine speech arises from stillness and returns to it, as breath returns to its source. In this sense, language becomes path and prayer. The simplicity of the aphorism is mercy; it leaves room for the reader’s spirit to breathe.
History pressed these insights into his body; he knew confinement. Later, illness limited his movements. He kept notebooks and wrote in a measured hand. Those spare reflections on suffering endure; they read like weathered prayer. “There is no certainty; there is only adventure.” Another line many still cherish: “Without forgiveness life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.”
Suffering does not always soften; many are bent by it. The difference in his witness lies in his stance. He treated pain as a teacher and submitted to its curriculum. Instead of a reason, he asked for a use. When the body would not obey, he trained the will to be gentle. When solitude deepened, he allowed attention to become precise. Out of that apprenticeship came a diction shorn of excess.
The aphorism suits this labor. Because its brevity gives the mind little to take hold of, the reader’s own resources are invited into the work. The saying reveals one face when we are hurried and another when we are still. In this way, it behaves like a mirror held to one’s inner state. The Sufis speak of barzakh, the interval between two shores. Every true aphorism exists there. It points toward what words cannot hold. It traverses the border where language meets silence. The best aphorisms shimmer with what they cannot fully say.
To engage with such words today is to remember that the soul is creative by nature. For Assagioli, healing and making arise from the same spring. Both ask for a gathered self, a love of form. A poem is shaped attention. A painting is a vow to perceive. The aphorism is a small chapel raised within language, a place where mystery and meaning meet without collision. Sacred art performs the same service on a larger scale. It gathers what has been scattered and gives it a home. It steadies a shaken mind through beauty. It speaks across distances of disbelief.
Then comes the question of its use in these times, when the planet runs a fever, public speech corrodes, and communities strain. Mass extinction proceeds while we meditate on aphorisms? Autocracy rises while we polish the mirror of the heart? To voice such objections is understandable. A turn inward can look like retreat.
Another reading is possible. Interior work restores the very faculties that equip us to act: clear seeing, steadiness, mercy. Awe widens the horizon; reverence protects what is fragile; imagination makes room for futures other than ruin. Without these, we meet crisis with habit and fatigue. With them, we can fashion responses that honor life.
The tension in his phrase about the sublime remains useful. Repression suggests force; atrophy suggests neglect. The sublime sits between these two, hidden in plain sight. We pass by because we have lost the habit of turning aside. The aphorism cultivates that turn. So does prayer, and so does art. Each interrupts drift. Each asks for a fuller attention than the market requires.
Truth resists capture. The mystics return to this again and again. Words can be faithful without being final. The strength of the aphorism lies here. It points and invites. We stand at the threshold it marks and discover that language, at its best, is a way of listening.
How to begin. Choose one sentence that carries light. Copy it by hand. Sit with it for three minutes before the day starts. Let the words settle as breath settles. In the evening, return to the same line. Add a walk without a phone; the streets will teach the pace again. Keep a poem within reach and speak it aloud each day. None of this refuses the world. It is the world met with a reawakened ear.
Consider this exercise, which Assagioli gave to students. Each morning, choose one quality to cultivate, compassion or courage or serenity. Find or compose a brief phrase that embodies it. “Peace begins in the breath.” “What is, is enough.” “The heart has its reasons.” Hold it for ten minutes in stillness. Do not think about it; rest with it. Notice what resists, what opens, what shifts. Keep to the practice for a month. You will have practiced being present to change. You will have learned that consciousness responds to what we feed it, that the sublime appears in the ordinary, brought to light through attention.