In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.
We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.
The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.
There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!
No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.
Both the young and the old are almost completely useless in our modern society, and are made keenly aware of that uselessness. They have no place. They are private, isolated – and hopeless.
The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity – the uniqueness of being “me” – are experienced.
Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.
The paradigm of Western culture is that the essence of persons is dangerous; thus, they must be taught, guided, and controlled by those with superior authority.
We in the West seem to have made a fetish out of complete individual self-sufficiency, of not needing help, of being completely private except in a very few selected relationships.
Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.
The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over.
To be original, or different, is felt to be “dangerous.”
This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.
With the price of life these days, you’ve got to get everything for free you can.
It is a direction not a destination.
It’s an awful risky thing to live.