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The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.
All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical.
IFS firefighters force an embodiment
The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence.
The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.
Symbiotic union has its biological pattern in the relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus.
The passive form of the symbiotic union is that of submission, or if we use a clinical term, of masochism.
In a religious context the object of worship is called an idol; in a secular context of a masochistic love relationship the essential mechanism, that of idolatry, is the same.
The active form of symbiotic fusion is domination or, to use the psychological term corresponding to masochism, sadism.
In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive,” because he is not “doing” anything.
responsibility.
Middah of achrayut
Today responsibility is often meant to denote duty, something imposed upon one from the outside.
But responsibility, in its true sense, is an entirely voluntary act; it is my response to the needs, expressed or unexpressed, of another human being. To be “respons...
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Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness,
were it not for a third component of love, respect.
Mother is warmth, mother is food, mother is the euphoric state of satisfaction and security. This state is one of narcissism, to use Freud’s term.
Further examination may show that certain types of neurosis, like obsessional neurosis, develop more on the basis of a one-sided {046} father attachment, while others, like hysteria, alcoholism, inability to assert oneself and to cope with life realistically, and depressions, result from mother-centeredness.
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love.
a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
One may be found in the narcissistic element in motherly love. Inasmuch as the infant is still felt to be a part of herself, her love and infatuation may be a satisfaction of her narcissism.
Another motivation may be found in a mother’s wish for power, or possession. The child, being helpless and completely subject to her will, is a natural object of satisfaction for a domineering and possessive woman.
In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate.
Man projects his own powers and skills into the things he makes, and thus in an alienated fashion worships his prowess, his possessions.
Idolizing as projecting and attaching
Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God’s name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence; God becomes truth, love, justice. God is I, inasmuch as I am human.
The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or his mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations, to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God.
Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described by Lao-tse. “Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical.
But paradoxical philosophy is neither in India nor in China to be confused with a dualistic standpoint.
The harmony (unity) consists in the conflicting position from which it is made up.
The emphasis of the Jewish religion was (especially from the beginning of our era on) on the right way of living, the Halacha (this word actually having the same meaning as the Tao).
No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love—brotherly love, motherly love, and erotic love—is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love.
Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food,
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In this concept of love and marriage the main emphasis is on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. In “love” one has found, at last, a haven from aloneness. One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism à deux is mistaken for love and intimacy.
If the nature of sanity is to grow out of the womb into the world,
the nature of severe mental disease is to be attracted by the womb, to be sucked back into it—and that is to be taken away from life.
Still another form of neurotic love lies in the use of projective mechanisms for the purpose of avoiding one’s own problems,
Another form of projection is the projection of one’s own problems on the children.
In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.
is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside,
but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will;
If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love.
They do not take the other person’s talk seriously, they do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired. They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired if they listened with concentration.
But the opposite is true. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake (although afterward natural and beneficial tiredness sets in), while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy—while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day.
The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one.
The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.
All of us do the same when we dream.
The insane person or the dreamer fails completely in having an objective view of the world outside; but all of us are more or less insane, or more or less asleep; all of us have an unobjective view of the world, one which is distorted by our narcissistic orientation.
The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility.
Middah of Anavah
attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.
irrational faith I understand the belief (in a person or an idea) which is based on one’s submission to irrational authority.
rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one’s own experience of thought or feeling.
irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority say so,
