The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
Limit the rules.
The “natural” human tendency to respond to the stranger, the strange idea and the creative individual with fear and aggression can be more easily comprehended, once it is understood that these diverse phenomena share categorical identity with the “natural disaster.
Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.
People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.
I have clients who are nowhere near as insane as their family is, but they’re the people who have been targeted with the mental illnesses because that’s convenient for everyone involved.
When you are fighting against something than there’s something else you are not doing.
He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.
You’re in order, when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair.
Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.
Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not – but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode.
Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage – a drama – instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, “You must rely on faith in what you already know.” But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.
And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us – in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.
Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity. Make friends with people who want the best for you.
To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time.
The forces of tyranny expand inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence.
If you start with little you start with more possibility.
What would your life look like, if it were better?
What do we see when we don’t know what we’re looking at?