The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.
As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power.
If I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be – who am “I”?
Reality imposes its law on man, laws that he can only escape in dreams or in states of trance – or in insanity.
What matters is the effect, not the process.
One discovers answers to problems only when one feels that they are burning and that it is a a matter of life and death to solve them. Is nothing is of burning interest, one’s reason and one’s critical faculty operate on a low level of activity; it appears then that one lacks the faculty to observe.
People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self.
Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.
The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.
An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.” On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances present.
My duty not to remain passive in a world which seems to be moving toward self-chosen catastrophe.
Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.
In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth woman: Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall.
But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. All.
The approach of normative humanism is based on the assumption that, as in any other problem, there are right and wrong, satisfactory and unsatisfactory solutions to the problem of human existence.
If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan, nation, if he retains the childish dependence on a punishing and rewarding father, or any other authority, he cannot develop a more mature love for God; then his religion is that of the earlier phase of religion, in which God was experienced as an all-protective mother or a punishing rewarding father. In.
The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love.
Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without.
The more man gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an ‘individual,’ he has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world that destroys his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.
Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity – and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful – briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns.