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continually acting in terms of the form which should be imposed upon his behavior.
acting in terms of the expectations
we do not need to be afraid of being “merely” homo sapiens.
When man’s unique capacity of awareness is thus functioning freely and fully, we find that we have, not an animal whom we must fear,
balanced, realistic, self-enhancing, other-enhancing behavior as a resultant
when he denies to awareness various aspects of his experience—then indeed we have all too often reason to fear him and his behavior,
He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is.
the deepest form of despair is to choose “to be another than himself.”
He is able to take in the evidence in a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which he already holds.
Formerly he could not freely feel pain or illness, because being ill meant being unacceptable.
Neither could he feel tenderness and love for his child, because such feelings meant being weak,
open to the experiences of his...
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the defects which interfere with this weighing and balancing are that we include things that are not a part of our experience,
“I can handle liquor,” when openness to his past experience would indicate that this is scarcely correct.
he possesses faults as well.
experience,
satisfactorily self-governing when not fearfully guarded.
“Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”
become more content to be a process rather than a product.
but a process of becoming.
“What—what’s hitting you now?”
I believe some people do not value fluidity. This will be one of the social value judgments which individuals and cultures will have to make.
It would occur very rarely, if ever, that a client who fully exemplified stage one would move to a point where he fully exemplified stage seven. If this did occur, it would involve a matter of years.
to be that self which one truly is.” (3, p. 29) I am quite aware that this may sound so simple as to be absurd.
shows a tendency to move away, hesitantly and fearfully, from a self that he is not.
tends to move away from being what is expected.
They do not, in other words, choose to be anything which is artificial, anything which is imposed, anything which is defined from without.
He decides what activities and ways of behaving have meaning for him, and what do not. I
I find that this desire to be all of oneself in each moment—all the richness and complexity, with nothing hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself—this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy.
OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE
Here he is opening himself to internal feelings which are clearly not new to him, but which up to this time, he has never been able fully to experience. Now that he can permit himself to experience them, he will find them less terrible,
He comes to want to be close to his inner sources of information rather than closing them off.
animal-like or child-like acceptance and spontaneity imply a superior awareness of their own impulses, their own desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.”
“self-actualized people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may be for other people.”
moves toward the acceptance of the experience of others.
“One does not complain about water because it is wet, nor about rocks because they are hard. . . . As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature both in himself and in others.”
“good writers do not write like this.” But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself,
people become significant and creative in their own spheres,
He is not trying to be more than he is, with the attendant feelings of insecurity or bombastic defensiveness.
His feelings, when he lives closely and acceptingly with their complexity, operate in a constructive harmony rather than sweeping him into some uncontrollably evil path.
lion
various tendencies and urges have a harmony within him.
I think perhaps you will agree with me that if we heard an individual speaking in these terms we would recognize at once that this must be a façade, that such statements could not possibly represent the real process going on within himself.
We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent.
it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is.
The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
his reactions may be trusted to be positive, forward-moving, constructive. We do not need to ask who will socialize him, for one of his own deepest needs is for affiliation and communication with others.
balanced and realistic, behavior which is appropriate to the survival and enhancement of a highly social animal.
our defenses keep us from being aware of this rationality,
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.
