Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. “To be idle,” Robert Louis Stevenson accurately wrote, “requires a strong sense of personal identity.” Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western world, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to one’s self, work for us modern
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