Faustian characters as we are, we cannot imagine "rest," "Nirvana," "eternity," except as a cessation of all activity in other words, as death. What our argument is reaching for is not death rather than life but a reconciliation of life and death. We have therefore to sustain the possibility of activity (life) which is also at rest.

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

The unrepressed animal carries no instinctual project to change his own nature; mankind must pass beyond repression if it is to find a life not governed by the unconscious project of finding another kind of life, one not governed by unconscious negativity. After man's unconscious search for his proper mode of being has ended, after history, has ended particular members of the human species may lead a life which, like the lives of the lower organisms, individually embodies the nature of the species. But only an individual life in this sense can be satisfactory to the individual who lives it. The attainment of individuality by the human species would therefore mean the return of the restless pleasure-principle to the peace of the Nirvana-principle.

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

In the unconscious cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head. We should then all be carrying our seeds in our head, like flowers.

Norman O. Brown, Love's Body