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Our Thesis Is That Symbols And Myths Are An Expression Of Man's Unique Self-consciousness, His Capacity To Transcend The Immediate Concrete Situation And See His Life In Terms Of 'the Possible,' And That This Capacity Is One Aspect Of His Experiencing Himself As A Being Having A World.

-Rollo May

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Our Thesis Is That

Rollo May

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Our Thesis Is That Symbols And Myths Are An Expression Of Man's Unique Self-consciousness, His Capacity To Transcend The Immediate Concrete Situation And See His Life In Terms Of 'the Possible,' And That This Capacity Is One Aspect Of His Experiencing Himself As A Being Having A World.

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It Is An Ironic Habit Of Human Beings To Run Faster When We Have Lost Our Way.

It Is Well To Remind Ourselves That Anxiety Signifies A Conflict, And So Long As A Conflict Is Going On, A Constructive Solution Is Possible.

The Mature Person Becomes Able To Differentiate Feelings Into As Many Nuances, Strong And Passionate Experiences, Or Delicate And Sensitive Ones, As In The Different Passages Of Music In A Symphony. Unfortunately, Many Of Us Have Feelings Limited Like Notes In A Bugle Call.

Fortunately, However, We No Longer Have To Argue That Self -love Is Not Only Necessary And Good But That It Also Is A Prerequisite For Loving Others.

People In Your Life

The Most Effective Way To Ensure The Value Of The Future Is To Confront The Present Courageously And Constructively.

Every Human Being Must Have A Point At Which He Stands Against The Culture, Where He Says, This Is Me And The Damned World Can Go To Hell.

It Is Infinitely Safer To Know That The Man At The Top Has His Doubts, As You And I Have Ours, Yet Has The Courage To Move Ahead In Spite Of These Doubts.

Courage Is Not The Absence Of Despair; It Is, Rather, The Capacity To Move Ahead In Spite Of Despair.

Inner Sense Of Worth That Comes With Being In Love Does Not Seem To Depend Essentially On Whether The Love Is Returned Or Not.

There Is Nobody Who Totally Lacks The Courage To Change.

Courage To Change

When I Fall In Love, I Feel More Valuable And I Treat Myself With More Care. We Have All Observed The Hesitant Adolescent, Uncertain Of Himself, Who, When He Or She Falls In Love, Suddenly Walks With A Certain Inner Assuredness And Confidence, A Mien Which Seems To Say, "you Are Looking At Somebody Now." For This Inner Sense Of Worth That Comes With Being In Love Does Not Seem To Depend Essentially On Whether The Love Is Returned Or Not.

Falling In Love

If We Admit Our Depression Openly And Freely, Those Around Us Get From It An Experience Of Freedom Rather Than The Depression Itself.

Heroes Are Necessary In Order To Enable The Citizens To Find Their Own Ideals, Courage And Wisdom In The Society. The Hero Carries Our Hopes, Our Aspirations, Our Ideals, Our Beliefs. In The Deepest Sense The Hero Is Created By Us; He Or She Is Born Collectively As Our Own Myth. This Is What Makes Heroism So Important: It Reflects Our Own Sense Of Identity And From This Our Own Heroism Is Molded.

A Myth Is A Way Of Making Sense In A Senseless World. Myths Are Narrative Patterns That Give Significance To Our Existence. Whether The Meaning Of Existence Is Only What We Put Into Life By Our Own Individual Fortitude, As Sartre Would Hold, Or Whether There Is A Meaning We Need To Discover, As Kierkegaard Would State, The Result Is The Same: Myths Are Our Way Of Finding This Meaning And Significance.

What Kierkegaard Said About Love Is Also True Of Creativity: Every Person Must Start At The Beginning.

The Constructive Schizoid Person Stands Against The Spiritual Emptiness Of Encroaching Technology And Does Not Let Himself Be Emptied By It. He Lives And Works With The Machine Without Becoming A Machine. He Finds It Necessary To Remain Detached Enough To Get Meaning From The Experience, But In Doing So, To Protect His Own Inner Life From Impoverishment.

They Pursue Meaninglessness Until They Can Force It To Mean.

We Express Our Being By Creating. Creativity Is A Necessary Sequel To Being.

The Insight Is Born With Anxiety, Guilt And The Joy And Gratification That Is Inseparable From The Actualizing Of A New Idea Or Vision.

The Individual Human Is Still The Creature Who Can Wonder, Who Can Be Enchanted By A Sonata, Who Can Place Symbols Together To Make Poetry To Gladden Our Heart, Who Can View A Sunrise With A Sense Of Majesty And Awe.

Finding The Center Of Strenghth Within Ourselves Is In The Long Run Best Contribution We Can Do To Our Fellow Man

Whereas Moral Courage Is The Righting Of Wrongs, Creative Courage, In Contrast, Is The Discovering Of New Forms, New Symbols, New Patterns On Which A New Society Can Be Built.

Understanding And Love Require A Wisdom That Comes Only With Age.

I Learned That Healing And Cure Are Active Processes In Which I Myself Needed To Participate.

One Of The Few Blessings Of Living In An Age Of Anxiety Is That We Are Forced To Become Aware Of Ourselves.

In Order To Be Open To Creativity, One Must Have The Capacity For Constructive Use Of Solitude. One Must Overcome The Fear Of Being Alone.

Apathy Adds Up, In The Long Run, To Cowardice.

The Ancient Greeks, As Plato Reports, Believed That We Discover Truth Through "reminiscence," That Is By "remembering," By Intuitively Searching Into Our Own Experience.

We Must Always Base Our Commitment In The Center Of Our Own Being, Or Else No Commitment Will Be Ultimately Authentic.

People Attain Worth And Dignity By The Multitude Of Decisions They Make From Day To Day.

Receptivity Requires A Nimbleness, A Fine-honed Sensitivity In Order To Let One's Self Be The Vehicle Of Whatever Vision May Emerge.

Every Act Of Genuine Creativity Means Achieving A Higher Level Of Self-awareness And Personal Freedom.

Intimacy Requires Courage Because Risk Is Inescapable.

Self Actualization

One Longs For The Presence Of A Leader Like Lincoln, Who Openly Admitted His Doubts And As Openly Preserved His Commitment.

Memory Is Not Just The Imprint Of The Past Time Upon Us; It Is The Keeper Of What Is Meaningful For Our Deepest Hopes And Fears.

Man Is The "ethical Animal" Ethical In Potentiality Even If, Unfortunately, Not In Actuality. His Capacity For Ethical Judgment Like Freedom, Reason And The Other Unique Characteristics Of The Human Being Is Based Upon His Consciousness Of Himself.

Courage Is The Basic Virtue For Everyone So Long As He Continues To Grow, To Move Ahead.

Humor Is The Healthy Way Of Feeling "distance" Between One's Self And The Problem, A Way Of Standing Off And Looking At One's Problem With Perspective.

In Religion, It Is Not The Sycophants Or Those Who Cling Most Faithfully To The Status Quo Who Are Ultimately Praised. It Is The Insurgents.

Lacking Positive Myths To Guide Him, Many A Sensitive Contemporary Man Finds Only The Model Of The Machine Beckoning Him From Every Side To Make Himself Over Into Its Image.

The Poet, Like The Lover, Is A Menace On The Assembly Line.

Joy Is The Zest That You Get Out Of Using Your Talents, Your Understanding, The Totality Of Your Being, For Great Aims...that's The Kind Of Feeling That Goes With Creativity. That's Why I Say The Courage To Create. Creation Does Not Come Out Of Simply What You're Born With. That Must Be United With Your Courage, Both Of Which Cause Anxiety, But Also Great Joy.

Using Your Talents

In My Clinical Experience, The Greatest Block To A Person's Development Is His Having To Take On A Way Of Life Which Is Not Rooted In His Own Powers.

Mass Communication--wonder As It May Be Technologically And Something To Be Appreciated And Valued--presents Us Wit A Serious Daner, The Danger Of Conformism, Due To The Fact That We All View The Same Things At The Same Time In All The Cities Of The Country. (p. 73)

The Function Of The Rebel Is To Shake The Fixated Mores Of The Rigid Order Of Civilization; And This Shaking, Though Painful, Is Necessary If The Society Is To Be Saved From Boredom And Apathy. Obviously I Do Not Refer To Everyone Who Calls Himself A Rebel, But Only To The Authentic Rebel. Civilization Gets Its First Flower From The Rebel.

Artistic Symbols And Myths Speak Out Of The Primordial, Preconscious Realm Of The Mind Which Is Powerful And Chaotic. Both Symbol And Myth Are Ways Of Bringing Order And Form Into This Chaos.

A Myth Is A Way Of Making Sense In A Senseless World. Myths Are Narrative Patterns That Give Significance To Our Existence.

It Requires Greater Courage To Preserve Inner Freedom, To Move On In One's Inward Journey Into New Realms, Than To Stand Defiantly For Outer Freedom. It Is Often Easier To Play The Martyr, As It Is To Be Rash In Battle.

It Is An Old And Ironic Habit Of Human Beings To Run Faster When We Have Lost Our Way; And We Grasp More Fiercely At Research, Statistics, And Technical Aids In Sex When We Have Lost The Values And Meaning Of Love.

The Word Courage Comes From The Same Stem As The French Word Coeur, Meaning "heart." Thus Just As One's Heart, By Pumping Blood To One's Arms, Legs, And Brain Enables All The Other Physical Organs To Function, So Courage Makes Possible All The Psychological Virtues. Without Courage Other Values Wither Away Into Mere Facsimiles Of Virtue.

Love Is Generally Confused With Dependence; But In Point Of Fact, You Can Love Only In Proportion To Your Capacity For Independence.

Poets Often Have A Conscious Awareness That They Are Struggling With The Daimonic, And That The Issue Is Their Working Something Through From The Depths Which Push The Self To A New Plane.

Creativity Occurs In An Act Of Encounter And Is To Be Understood With This Encounter As Its Center.

The Daimonic Refers To The Power Of Nature Rather Than The Superego, And Is Beyond Good And Evil. Nor Is It Man's 'recall To Himself' As Heidegger And Later Fromm Have Argued, For Its Source Lies In Those Realms Where The Self Is Rooted In Natural Forces Which Go Beyond The Self And Are Felt As The Grasp Of Fate Upon Us. The Daimonic Arises From The Ground Of Being Rather Than The Self As Such.

Unconscious Insights Or Answers To Problems That Come In Reverie Do Not Come Hit Or Miss... They Pertain To Those Areas In Which The Person Consciously Has Worked Laboriously And With Dedication.

This Personal Freedom To Think And Feel And Speak Authentically And To Be Conscious Of So Doing Is The Quality That Distinguishes Us As Human.

Insight Comes At A Moment Of Transition Between Work And Relaxation.

We Must Be Fully Committed, But We Must Also Be Aware At The Same Time That We Might Possibly Be Wrong. People Who Claim To Be Absolutely Convinced That Their Stand Is The Only Right One...is A Dead Giveaway Of Unconscious Doubt. Commitment Is Healthiest When It Is Not Without Doubt, But In Spite Of Doubt.

Intimacy Requires Courage Because Risk Is Inescapable. We Cannot Know At The Outset How The Relationship Will Affect Us.

Self Actualization

Ecstasy Is The Accurate Term For The Intensity Of Consciousness That Occurs In The Creative Act.

People Only Change When It Becomes Too Dangerous To Stay The Way They Are.

Mark Tobey Fills His Canvases With Elliptical, Calligraphic Lines, Beautiful Whirls That Seem At First Glance To Be Completely Abstract And To Come From Nowhere At All Except His Own Subjective Musing. But I Shall Never Forget How Struck I Was, On Visiting Tobey's Studio One Day, To See Strewn Around Books On Astronomy And Photographs Of The Milky Way. I Knew Then That Tobey Experiences The Movement Of The Stars And Solar Constellations As The External Pole Of His Encounter.

Courage Is Required Not Only In A Person's Occasional Crucial Decision For His Own Freedom, But In The Little Hour-to-hour Decisions Which Place The Bricks In The Structure Of His Building Of Himself Into A Person Who Acts With Freedom And Responsibility.

It Is Highly Significant And Indeed Almost A Rule, That Moral Courage Has Its Source In Such Identification Through One's Own Sensitivity With Suffering Of One's Fellow Human Beings." (p. 16-17)

Care Is A State In Which Something Does Matter; Care Is The Opposite Of Apathy. Care Is The Necessary Source Of Eros, The Source Of Human Tenderness.

I Became A Psychotherapist Because That's Where People Will Unburden Themselves, Where They Will Show What Is In Their Hearts.

Competitive Individualism Militates Against The Experience Of Community, And That Lack Of Community Is A Centrally Important Factor In Contemporaneous Anxiety.

Creativity Is The Process Of Bringing Something New Into Being. Creativity Requires Passion And Commitment. It Brings To Our Awareness What Was Previously Hidden And Points To New Life. The Experience Is One Of Heightened Consciousness: Ecstasy.

A Person Can Meet Anxiety To The Extent That His Values Are Stronger Than The Threat.

The Ultimate Error Is The Refusal To Look Evil In The Face.

Science, Nietzsche Had Warned, Is Becoming A Factory, And The Result Will Be Ethical Nihilism.

Our Thesis Is That Symbols And Myths Are An Expression Of Man's Unique Self-consciousness, His Capacity To Transcend The Immediate Concrete Situation And See His Life In Terms Of 'the Possible,' And That This Capacity Is One Aspect Of His Experiencing Himself As A Being Having A World.

Freedom Is Man's Capacity To Take A Hand In His Own Development. It Is Our Capacity To Mold Ourselves.

When People Feel Their Insignificance As Individual Persons, They Also Suffer An Undermining Of Their Sense Of Human Responsibility.

Physical Courage In Whatever Scene ... Seems To Hinge On Whether The Individual Can Feel He Is Fighting For Others As Well As Himself.

Artists Love To Immerse Themselves In Chaos In Order To Put It Into Form, Just As God Created Form Out Of Chaos In Genesis. Forever Unsatisfied With The Mundane, The Apathetic, The Conventional, They Always Push On To Newer Worlds.

Forge In The Smithy Of Your Soul.

The Acorn Becomes An Oak By Means Of Automatic Growth; No Commitment Is Necessary. The Kitten Similarly Becomes A Cat On The Basis Of Instinct. Nature And Being Are Identical In Creatures Like Them. But A Man Or Woman Becomes Fully Human Only By His Or Her Choices And His Or Her Commitment To Them. People Attain Worth And Dignity By The Multitude Of Decisions They Make From Day By Day. These Decisions Require Courage.

Tenderness Emerges From The Fact That The Two Persons, Longing, As All Individuals Do, To Overcome The Separateness And Isolation To Which We Are All Heir Because We Are Individuals, Can Participate In A Relationship That, For The Moment, Is Not Of Two Isolated Selves But A Union

Funny Relationship

Tools And Techniques Ought To Be An Extension Of Consciousness, But They Can Just As Easily Be A Protection From Consciousness. Then The Tools Become Defence Mechanisms... Against The Unconscious.

Terrorism And The Whole Drug Scene Are Vivid Examples Of The Fact That What Persons Abhor Most Of All In Life Is The Possibility That They Will Not Matter.

The Creative Process Must Be Explored... As The Expression Of The Normal People In The Act Of Actualizing Themselves.

However It May Be Confounded Or Covered Up Or Counterfeited, This Elemental Capacity To Fight Against Injustice Remains The Distinguishing Characteristic Of Human Beings.

What Anxiety Means Is It's As Though The World Is Knocking At Your Door, And You Need To Create, You Need To Make Something, You Need To Do Something. I Think Anxiety, For People Who Have Found Their Own Heart And Their Own Souls, For Them It Is A Stimulus Toward Creativity, Toward Courage. It's What Makes Us Human Beings.

No One Can Separate Themselves From One's Social Group And Remain Healthy, Because The Very Structure Of Personality Is Dependent On The Community.

We Cannot Will To Have Insights. We Cannot Will To Have Creativity, But We Can Will To Give Ourselves To The Creative Experience With Intensity Of Dedication And Commitment.

Finding The Center Of Strength Within Ourselves Is In The Long Run The Best Contribution We Can Make To Our Fellow Men. ... One Person With Indigenous Inner Strength Exercises A Great Calming Effect On Panic Among People Around Him. This Is What Our Society Needs - Not New Ideas And Inventions; Important As These Are, And Not Geniuses And Supermen, But Persons Who Can Be, That Is, Persons Who Have A Center Of Strength Within Themselves.

Our Powerful Hunger For Myth Is A Hunger For Community. The Person Without A Myth Is A Person Without A Home...to Be A Member Of One's Community Is To Share In Its Myths.

Every Authentic Artist Is Engaged In This Creating Of The Conscience Of The Race, Even Though He Or She May Be Unaware Of The Fact.

Human Freedom Involves Our Capacity To Pause, To Choose The One Response Toward Which We Wish To Throw Our Weight.

It Is Interesting To Note How Many Of The Great Scientific Discoveries Begin As Myths.

Creativity Is The Process Of Bringing Something New Into Being.

Does Not The Possibility Or The Power To Do Something About The Situation At Hand Confer On One The Responsibility To Do It?

Whatever Sphere We May Be In, There Is A Profound Joy In The Realization That We Are Helping To Form The Structure Of The New World. This Is Creative Courage, However Minor Or Fortuitous Our Creations May Be.

When Inward Life Dries Up, When Feeling Decreases And Apathy Increases, When One Cannot Affect Or Even Genuinely Touch Another Person, Violence Flares Up As A Daimonic Necessity For Contact, A Mad Drive Forcing Touch In The Most Direct Way Possible.

Our Age Is One Of Transition, In Which The Normal Channels For Utilizing The Daimonic Are Denied; And Such Ages Tend To Be Times When The Daimonic Is Expressed In Its Most Destructive Form.

The Hallmark Of Courage In Our Age Of Conformity Is The Capacity To Stand On One's Own Convictions - Not Obstinately Or Defiantly

When One Read's Kierkegaard's Profound Analyses Of Anxiety And Despair Or Nietzsche's Amazingly Acute Insights Into The Dynamics Of Resentment And The Guilt And Hostility Which Accompany Repressed Emotional Powers, One Might Pinch Oneself To Realize That One Is Reading Works Written In The Last Century And Not Some New Contemporary Psychological Analysis.

Something Is Born, Comes Into Being, Something That Did Not Exist Before - Which Is As Good A Definition Of Creativity As We Can Get.

Those We Call Saints Rebelled Against An Outmoded And Inadequate Form Of God On The Basis Of Their New Insights Into Divinity.

All Our Feelings, Like The Artist's Paints And Brush, Are Ways Of Communicating And Sharing Something Meaningful From Us To The World.

In Any Age Courage Is The Simple Virtue Needed For A Human Being To Traverse The Rocky Road From Infancy To Maturity Of Personality. But In An Age Of Anxiety, An Age Of Herd Morality And Personal Isolation, Courage Is A Sine Qua Non. In Periods When The Mores Of The Society Were More Consistent Guides, The Individual Was More Firmly Cushioned In His Crises Of Development; But In Times Of Transition Like Ours, The Individual Is Thrown On His Own At An Earlier Age And For A Longer Period.

Creativity Is Neither The Product Of Neurosis Nor Simple Talent, But An Intense Courageous Encounter With The Gods.

Creativity Is Not Merely The Innocent Spontaneity Of Our Youth And Childhood; It Must Also Be Married To The Passion Of The Adult Human Being, Which Is A Passion To Live Beyond One's Death.

The Danger Always Exists That Our Technology Will Serve As A Buffer Between Us And Nature, A Block Between Us And The Deeper Dimensions Of Our Own Experience.

Life Comes From Physical Survival; But The Good Life Comes From What We Care About.

Power Is Required For Communication. To Stand Before An Indifferent Or Hostile Group And Have One's Say, Or To Speak Honestly To A Friend Truths That Go Deep And Hurt These Require Self-affirmation, Self-assertion, And Even At Times Aggression. ... My Experience In Psychotherapy Convinces Me That The Act Which Requires The Most Courage Is The Simple Communication, Unpropelled By Rage Or Anger, Of One's Deepest Thoughts To Another.

Joy Is The Effect Which Comes When We Use Our Powers.

When We Are Dealing With Human Beings, No Truth Has Reality By Itself; It Is Always Dependent Upon The Reality Of The Immediate Relationship.

Anxiety Is An Even Better Teacher Than Reality, For One Can Temporarily Evade Reality By Avoiding The Distasteful Situation; But Anxiety Is A Source Of Education Always Present Because One Carries It Within.

Neither Kierkegaard Nor Nietzsche Had The Slightest Interest In Starting A Movement – Or A New System, A Thought Which Would Indeed Have Offended Them. Both Proclaimed, In Nietzsche's Phrase, Follow Not Me, But You!

Artists Do Not Run Away From Non-being, But By Encountering And Wrestling With It, Force It To Produce Being.

The Receptivity Of The Artist Must Never Be Confused With Passivity. Receptivity Is The Artist's Holding Him Or Herself Alive And Open To Hear What Being May Speak.

Therapy Isn't Curing Somebody Of Something; It Is A Means Of Helping A Person Explore Himself, His Life, His Consciousness. My Purpose As A Therapist Is To Find Out What It Means To Be Human. Every Human Being Must Have A Point At Which He Stands Against The Culture, Where He Says, "this Is Me And The World Be Damned!" Leaders Have Always Been The Ones To Stand Against The Society - Socrates, Christ, Freud, All The Way Down The Line.

Hate Is Not The Opposite Of Love; Apathy Is.

Evil, In This System Of Ethics, Is That Which Tears Apart, Shuts Out The Other Person, Raises Barriers, Sets People Against Each Other.

There Can Be No Stronger Proof Of The Impoverishment Of Our Contemporary Culture Than The Popular - Though Profoundly Mistaken - Definition Of Myth As Falsehood.

Depression Is The Inability To Construct A Future.

The Turtle Only Makes Progress When It's Neck Is Stuck Out.

Real Freedom Is The Ability To Pause Between Stimulus And Response, And In That Pause, Choose.

Stimulus And Response

Intimacy Requires Courage Because Risk Is Inescapable. We Cannot Know At The Outset How The Relationship Will Affect Us. Like A Chemical Mixture, If One Of Us Is Changed, Both Of Us Will Be. Will We Grow In Self-actualization, Or Will It Destroy Us? The One Thing We Can Be Certain Of Is That If We Let Ourselves Fully Into The Relationship For Good Or Evil, We Will Not Come Out Unaffected.

Everyone Has A Need For Significance; And If We Can't Make That Possible, Or Even Probable, In Our Society, Then It Will Be Obtained In Destructive Ways.

What If Imagination And Art Are Not Frosting At All, But The Fountainhead Of Human Experience?

Joy, Rather Than Happiness, Is The Goal Of Life, For Joy Is The Emotion Which Accompanies Our Fulfilling Our Natures As Human Beings. It Is Based On The Experience Of One's Identity As A Being Of Worth And Dignity.

It Is Dangerous To Know, But It Is More Dangerous Not To Know.

Consciousness Is The Awareness That Emerges Out Of The Dialectical Tension Between Possibilities And Limitations.

A Historical Perspective Can Also Help Free Us From The Ever-present Danger -- Especially At Danger In The Social Sciences -- Of Absolutizing A Theory Or Method Which Is Actually Relative To The Fact That We Live At A Given Moment In Time In The Development Of Our Particular Culture.

In Any Discussion Of Religion And Personality Integration The Question Is Not Whether Religion Itself Makes For Health Or Neurosis, But What Kind Of Religion And How Is It Used? Freud Was In Error When He Held That Religion Is Per Se A Compulsion Neurosis. Some Religion Is And Some Is Not.

Generally, The Shaking Is Consciously Felt In Its Positive Aspects — As The Wonderful New Heaven And Earth Which Love With Its Miracle And Mystery Has Suddenly Produced. Love Is The Answer, We Sing. Our Western Culture Seems To Be Engaged In A Romantic - Albeit Desperate - Conspiracy To Enforce The Illusion That That Is All There Is To Eros.

Falling In Love

The Schizoid Man Is The Natural Product Of The Technological Man. It Is One Way To Live And Is Increasingly Utilized And It May Explode Into Violence.

Creativity Arises Out Of The Tension Between Spontaneity And Limitations, The Latter (like The River Banks) Forcing The Spontaneity Into The Various Forms Which Are Essential To The Work Of Art Or Poem.

Symbols Are Specific Acts Or Figures, While Myths Develop And Elaborate These Symbols Into A Story Which Contains Characters And Several Episodes. The Myth Is Thus More Inclusive. But Both Symbol And Myth Have The Same Function Psychologically; They Are Man's Way Of Expressing The Quintessence Of His Experience - His Way Of Seeing His Life, His Self-image And His Relations To The World Of His Fellow Men And Of Nature - In A Total Figure Which At The Same Moment Carries The Vital Meaning Of This Experience.

The Creative Act Arises Out Of The Struggle Of Human Beings With And Against That Which Limits Them.

Good Art Wounds As Well As Delights. It Must, Because Our Defenses Against The Truth Are Wound So Tightly Around Us. But As Art Chips Away At Our Defenses, It Also Opens Us To Healing Potentialities That Transcend Intellectual Games And Ego-preserving Strategies.

Many People Feel They Are Powerless To Do Anything Effective With Their Lives. It Takes Courage To Break Out Of The Settled Mold, But Most Find Conformity More Comfortable. This Is Why The Opposite Of Courage In Our Society Is Not Cowardice, It's Conformity.

Creativity Is A Yearning For Immortality

Humans Have A Habit Of Running Faster When They Have Lost Their Way.

A Dynamic Struggle Goes On Within A Person Between What He Or She Consciously Thinks On The One Hand And, On The Other, Some Insight, Some Perspective That Is Struggling To Be Born.

It Is Necessary For The Birthing Process To Begin To Move In Its Own Organic Time. It Is Necessary That The Artist Have This Sense Of Timing, That He Or She Respect... Periods Of Receptivity As Part Of The Mystery Of Creativity And Creation.

What Is Courage? This Courage Will Not Be The Opposite Of Despair. We Shall Often Be Faced With Despair, As Indeed Every Sensitive Person Has Been During The Last Several Decades In This Country. Hence Kierkegaard And Nietzsche And Camus And Sartre Have Proclaimed That Courage Is Not The Absence Of Despair; It Is, Rather, The Capacity To Move Ahead In Spite Of Despair.

We Receive Love — From Our Children As Well As Others — Not In Proportion To Our Demands Or Sacrifices Or Needs, But Roughly In Proportion To Our Own Capacity To Love.

Capacity To Love

To Believe Fully And At The Same Moment To Have Doubts Is Not At All A Contradiction: It Presupposes A Greater Respect For Truth, An Awareness That Truth Always Goes Beyond Anything That Can Be Said Or Done At Any Given Moment.

Creativity Is The Encounter Of The Intensively Conscious Human Being With His World.

If You Do Not Express Your Own Original Ideas, If You Do Not Listen To Your Own Being, You Will Have Betrayed Yourself.

Deeds Of Violence In Our Society Are Performed Largely By Those Trying To Establish Their Self-esteem, To Defend Their Self-image, And To Demonstrate That They, Too, Are Significant.

Creativity Is The Result Of A Struggle Between Vitality And Form. As Anyone Who Has Tried To Write A Sonnet Or Scan Poetry, Is Aware, The Form Ideally Do Not Take Away From The Creativity But May Add To It.

Beauty Is The Experience That Gives Us A Sense Of Joy And A Sense Of Peace Simultaneously.

It Is Amazing How Many Hints And Guides And Intuitions For Living Come To The Sensitive Person Who Has Ears To Hear What His Body Is Saying.

Sensitive Person

To Say A Person Is A Coward Has No More Meaning Than To Say He Is Lazy: It Simply Tells Us That Some Vital Potentiality Is Unrealized Or Blocked.

The Value Of Dreams, Like ... Divinations, Is Not That They Give A Specific Answer, But That They Open Up New Areas Of Psychic Reality, Shake Us Out Of Our Customary Ruts, And Throw Light On A New Segment Of Our Lives. Thus The Sayings Of The Shrine, Like Dreams, Were Not To Be Received Passively; The Recipients Had To "live" Themselves Into The Message.

One Central Need In Life Is To Fulfill Its Own Potential.

Courage Is The Capacity To Meet The Anxiety Which Arises As One Achieves Freedom. It Is The Willingness To Differentiate, To Move From The Protecting Realms Of Parental Dependence To New Levels Of Freedom And Integration.

Violence Arises Not Out Of Superfluity Of Power But Out Of Powerlessness.

Existential Psychotherapy Is The Movement Which, Although Standing On One Side On The Scientific Analysis Owed Chiefly To The Genius Of Freud , Also Brings Back Into The Picture The Understanding Of Man On The Deeper And Broader Level Man As The Being Who Is Human. It Is Based On The Assumption That It Is Possible To Have A Science Of Man Which Does Not Fragmentize Man And Destroy His Humanity At The Same Moment As It Studies Him. It Unites Science And Ontology .

This Is Hard For Parents To Say Genuinely.

The Daimonic Is Any Natural Function Which Has The Power To Take Over The Whole Person. Sex And Eros, Anger And Rage, And The Craving For Power Are Examples. The Daimonic Can Be Either Creative Or Destructive And Is Normally Both.

Suffering Is Nature's Way Of Indicating A Mistaken Attitude Or Way Of Behavior, And To The Nonegocentric Person Every Moment Of Suffering Is The Opportunity For Growth. People Should Rejoice In Suffering, Strange As It Sounds, For This Is A Sign Of The Availability Of Energy To Transform Their Characters.

Communication Leads To Community, That Is, To Understanding, Intimacy And Mutual Valuing.

One Does Not Become Fully Human Painlessly.

When You Are Completely Absorbed Or Caught Up In Something, You Become Oblivious To Things Around You, Or To The Passage Of Time. It Is This Absorption In What You Are Doing That Frees Your Unconscious And Releases Your Creative Imagination.

... What The Artist Or Creative Scientist Feels Is Not Anxiety Or Fear; It Is Joy. I Use The Word In Contrast To Happiness Or Pleasure. The Artist, At The Moment Of Creating, Does Not Experience Gratification Or Satisfaction... Rather, It Is Joy, Joy Defined As The Emotion That Goes With Heightened Consciousness, The Mood That Accompanies The Experience Of Actualizing One's Own Potentialities.

There Is No Authentic Inner Freedom That Does Not, Sooner Or Later, Also Affect And Change Human History.

Sooner Or Later

One Must Have At Least A Readiness To Love The Other Person, Broadly Speaking, If One Is To Be Able To Understand Him.

The First Thing Necessary For A Constructive Dealing With Time Is To Learn To Live In The Reality Of The Present Moment. For Psychologically Speaking, This Present Moment Is All We Have.

All People Are Struggling To Be Creative In Some Way, And The Artist Is The One Who Has Succeeded In This Task Of Life.

Freedom Does Not Come Automatically; It Is Achieved. And It Is Not Gained In A Single Bound; It Must Be Achieved Each Day.

That Because Of This Interplay Of Conscious And Unconscious Factors In Guilt And The Impossibility Of Legalistic Blame, We Are Forced Into An Attitude Of Acceptance Of The Universal Human Situation And A Recognition Of The Participation Of Every One Of Us In Man's Inhumanity To Man.

Courage Is Not A Virtue Of Value Among Other Personal Values Like Love Or Fidelity. It Is The Foundation That Underlies And Gives Reality To All Other Virtues And Personal Values. Without Courage Our Love Pales Into Mere Dependency. Without Courage Our Fidelity Becomes Conformism.

Now, I Believe In Life, And I Believe In The Joy Of Human Existence, But These Things Cannot Be Experienced Except As We Also Face The Despair, Also Face The Anxiety That Every Human Being Has To Face If He Lives With Any Creativity At All.

One Of The Easiest Ways To Be Irresponsible About Power Is To Forget You Have It.

Anxiety Is Essential To The Human Condition. The Confrontation With Anxiety Can Relieve Us From Boredom, Sharpen The Sensitivity And Assure The Presence Of Tension That Is Necessary To Preserve Human Existence.

Professors Will Lecture With More Inspiration If They Occasionally Alternate The Classroom With The Beach: Authors Will Write Better When, As Macaulay Used To Do, They Write For Two Hours, Then Pitch Quoits, And Then Go Back To Their Writing. But Certainly More Than The Mere Mechanical Alternation Is Involved.

Courage Is Necessary To Make Being And Becoming Possible.

Recall How Often In Human History The Saint And The Rebel Have Be The Same Person. (p. 35)

It Requires Greater Courage To Preserve Inner Freedom, To Move On In One's Inward Journey Into New Realms, Than To Stand Defiantly For Outer Freedom. It Is Often Easier To Play The Martyr, As It Is To Be Rash In Battle. Strange As It Sounds, Steady, Patient Growth In Freedom Is Probably The Most Difficult Task Of All, Requiring The Greatest Courage. Thus If The Term "hero" Is Used In This Discussion At All, It Must Refer Not To The Special Acts Of Outstanding Persons, But To The Heroic Element Potentially In Every Man.

By The Creative Act, We Are Able To Reach Beyond Our Own Death.

The Opposite Of Courage In Our Society Is Not Cowardice, It Is Conformity.

The Essence Of Being Human Is That, In The Brief Moment We Exist On This Spinning Planet, We Can Love Some Persons And Some Things, In Spite Of The Fact That Time And Death Will Ultimately Claim Us All.

The Authentic Rebel Knows That The Silencing Of All His Adversaries Is The Last Thing On Earth He Wishes: Their Extermination Would Deprive Him And Whoever Else Remains Alive From The Uniqueness, The Originality, And The Capacity For Insight That These Enemies Being Human Also Have And Could Share With Him. If We Wish The Death Of Our Enemies, We Cannot Talk About The Community Of Man. In The Losing Of The Chance For Dialogue With Our Enemies, We Are The Poorer.

There Is An Energy Field Between Humans. And, When We Reach Out In Passion, It Is Met With An Answering Passion And Changes The Relationship Forever.

Dogmatism Of All Kinds--scientific, Economic, Moral, As Well As Political--are Threatened By The Creative Freedom Of The Artist. This Is Necessarily And Inevitably So. We Cannot Escape Our Anxiety Over The Fact That The Artists Together With Creative Persons Of All Sorts, Are The Possible Destroyer Of Our Nicely Ordered Systems. (p. 76)

Purpose In The Human Being Is A Much More Complex Phenomenon Than What Used To Be Called Will Power.

Poets May Be Delightful Creatures In The Meadow Or The Garret, But They Are Menaces On The Assembly Line.

There Is A Curiously Sharp Sense Of Joy - Or Perhaps Better Expressed, A Sense Of Mild Ecstasy - That Comes When You Find The Particular Form Required By Your Creation.

If The Will Remains In Protest, It Stays Dependent On That Which It Is Protesting Against.

The Relationship Between Commitment And Doubt Is By No Means An Antagonistic One. Commitment Is Healthiest When It Is Not Without Doubt But In Spite Of Doubt.

Many People Suffer From The Fear Of Finding Oneself Alone, And So They Don't Find Themselves At All.

To Love Means To Open Ourselves To The Negative As Well As The Positive - To Grief, Sorrow, And Disappointment As Well As To Joy, Fulfillment, And An Intensity Of Consciousness We Did Not Know Was Possible Before

By Whatever Name One Calls It, Genuine Creativity Is Characterized By An Intensity Of Awareness, A Heightened Consciousness.

Human Freedom Involves Our Capacity To Pause Between The Stimulus And Response And, In That Pause, To Choose The One Response Toward Which We Wish To Throw Our Weight. The Capacity To Create Ourselves, Based Upon This Freedom, Is Inseparable From Consciousness Or Self-awareness. (p. 100)

The Purpose Of Psychotherapy Is To Set People Free.

Indeed, Compulsive And Rigid Moralism Arises In Given Persons Precisely As The Result Of A Lack Of Sense Of Being. Rigid Moralism Is A Compensatory Mechanism By Which The Individual Persuades Himself To Take Over The External Sanctions Because He Has No Fundamental Assurance That His Own Choices Have Any Sanction Of Their Own

Creative People... Are Distinguished By The Fact That They Can Live With Anxiety, Even Though A High Price May Be Paid In Terms Of Insecurity, Sensitivity, And Defenselessness For The Gift Of 'divine Madness,' To Borrow The Term Used By The Classical Greeks.

Reason Works Better When Emotions Are Present; The Person Sees Sharper And More Accurately When His Emotions Are Engaged.

It May Sound Surprising When I Say, On The Basis Of My Own Clinical Practice As Well As That Of My Psychological And Psychiatric Colleagues, That The Chief Problem Of People In The Middle Decade Of The Twentieth Century Is Emptiness.

We Define Religion As The Assumption That Life Has Meaning. Religion, Or Lack Of It, Is Shown Not In Some Intellectual Or Verbal Formulations But In One's Total Orientation To Life. Religion Is Whatever The Individual Takes To Be His Ultimate Concern. One's Religious Attitude Is To Be Found At That Point Where He Has A Conviction That There Are Values In Human Existence Worth Living And Dying For.

There Is No Meaningful Yes Unless The Individual Could Also Have Said No.

The Rebel Is Committed To Giving A Form And Pattern To The World. It Is A Pattern Born Of The Indomitable Thrust Of The Human Mind, The Mind Which Makes Out Of The Mass Of Meaningless Data In The World An Order And A Form.

Vanity And Narcissism — The Compulsive Need To Be Admired And Praised — Undermine One's Courage, For One Then Fights On Someone Else's Conviction Rather Than One's Own.

The Amazing Thing About Love Is That It Is The Best Way To Get To Know Ourselves.

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Eddie Bernice Johnson

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