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On humans these days:
Hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.
-Earnest Becker.
Hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.
-Earnest Becker.
Never in my life , have I read anything so intense and profound.
I not sure whether I can share a few thoughts from the book due to copy-rights isssue , but I will surely share a few.
I not sure whether I can share a few thoughts from the book due to copy-rights isssue , but I will surely share a few.
Life is, after all, a challenge to the creature, a fascinating opportunity to expand. Psychologically it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?
How a person solves his natural yearnings for self-expansion and significance determines the quality of his life.
playboy mystique : de-spiritualizing relationship
romantic lovers : spiritualizing relationship.
Both are two extremes of the same relationship.
one is expecting too less from the love object, other is expecting too much from the love object.
romantic lovers : spiritualizing relationship.
Both are two extremes of the same relationship.
one is expecting too less from the love object, other is expecting too much from the love object.
The line between natural self-surrender, in wanting to be a part of something larger, and masochistic or self-negating surrender is thin indeed.
Every one experience the world in similar ways and only the quality and the power of the reaction differ.
All through history it is the “normal, average men” who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
Creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed.
We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments.And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness,awe and fear before these very same possibilities
Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.
Meaning: people are more depressed today because they are not enough challenges left in the world to solve, and there by become a hero in people's view.
Meaning: people are more depressed today because they are not enough challenges left in the world to solve, and there by become a hero in people's view.
We still haven’t explained the inner forces of evolution that have led to the development of an animal capable of self-consciousness, which is what we still must mean by “soul”.
What is the “best” illusion under which to live? I think the whole question would be answered in terms of how much freedom, dignity, and hope a given illusion provides.
If one’s life has been a series of “silent retreats,” one ends up firmly wedged into a corner and has nowhere else to retreat. This state is the bogging-down of depression.
we can get some correct feeling for the magnitude of the task of poor Mr. Average Man, just daily trying to negotiate a semblance of tranquil heroism by embedding himself in the powers of others.
Everyone experience the world in similar ways and only the quality and the power of the reaction differ.
There is only one difference between a Genius and Schizophrenic:
A Genius is able to channel his "Strong Ego" towards something creative while schizophrenic, lacking ego, is unable to channel his inner resources and finally ends in an Asylum.
Summary: If you have an ego,use it !
A Genius is able to channel his "Strong Ego" towards something creative while schizophrenic, lacking ego, is unable to channel his inner resources and finally ends in an Asylum.
Summary: If you have an ego,use it !
The only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one’s life as a gift to the highest powers.Absolution has to come from the absolute beyond. As Kierkegaard, Rank showed that this rule applied to the strongest, most heroic types—not to trembling and empty weaklings
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
There is no way to experience all of life; each person must close off large portions of it, must “partialize,” as Rank put it, in order to avoid being overwhelmed.
The ego represents,a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life. If the urge toward more life is an evolutionary blunder, then we are calling into question all of creation and fitting it into the narrow mold of our own preferences.
Rieff’s point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible.
If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.
Marx’s defiant revolutionary phrase: “I am nothing and should be everything.” For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile/Child unconscious speaking.
Animals don't have dualist nature.
But humans have -a physical one and conscious one.
This burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life,for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness.
But humans have -a physical one and conscious one.
This burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life,for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness.
Man spends all his life training,honing his skills, becomes a man with nobility, then the real tragedy,
as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition:
"That it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying".
as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition:
"That it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying".
Norman Brown’s wrote in his book Love’s Body -"that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond"
*End of thread*
*End of thread*
