The Art of Being

by Erich Fromm

one will become very sensitive to the small signs of submission, one will look through the rationalization that justifies it, one will practice courage, and one will discover that once the problem and its central significance are recognized, one discovers by oneself many answers to the question.

If nothing is of burning interest, one’s reason and one’s critical faculty operate on a low level of activity;

Another helpful attitude is one of deep distrust.

How little concentration on a subject and on the other person occurs in conversations is surely known to anyone who observes average oral exchanges. When people are by themselves they also avoid concentrating on anything; they immediately pick up a newspaper or a magazine, which permits easy reading and demands no real concentration.

Concentration is such a rare phenomenon because one’s will is not directed to one thing;

nothing is worth the effort to concentrate on it, because no goal is pursued passionately. But there is more to it: People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are ...

Finally, to concentrate requires inner activity, not busy-ness, and this activity is rare today when busy-ness is the key to success.

They think that concentrating is too strenuous an activity and that they would get tired quickly. In fact the opposite is true, as anyone can observe in oneself. Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.

The process of work is too monotonous to permit genuine concentration.

How does one learn to concentrate? The answer to this question must be either very brief or very long. For reasons of space, it must be brief.

I suggest to practice how to be still.

After having achieved a certain amount of stillness—the effort may last from one to three months—it is to be recommended to add direct concentration exercises during or after the stillness. Practically speaking, this can be done in many ways. One may focus on a coin and concentrate completely on all its details, to the point where one sees it fully with closed eyes; or one may use any other object—a vase, a clock, a telephone, a flower, a leaf, a stone, or whatever one wishes to concentrate on. Or,

Here, as with everything living, force does not do any good;

it does not help to try to force out tangential thoughts, to treat them as if they were enemies, and hence to feel defeated if one has not won the battle. They need to be treated gently, and that means one must be patient with oneself.

(Impatience is usually the outcome of the inte...

I must leave it to the experience of each reader to gather material for the thesis that most of our personal relationships suffer from the complete absence of concentration. We tend to be very poor judges of character because we do not go much beyond grasping the surface of another’s personality—i.e., what he says, how he behaves, what position he has, how he is dressed. In short, we observe the persona, the mask that he shows us, and we do not penetrate through this surface to lift the mask and see who the person is behind it. This

Concentrated observation of one person forces us to respond with compassion, care, or, on the other hand, horror—all of which are unfavorable to the smooth functioning of a cybernetic society. We want distance, we want to know of each other just as much as is necessary to live together, to cooperate, to feel secure. Hence, knowledge of the surface is desirable, knowledge gained from concentration is disturbing.

the Buddhist concept of mindfulness means precisely a way of being in which one is fully concentrated on everything one is doing at any given moment, whether it is planting a seed or cleaning a room or eating. Or as a Zen master has said: “When I sleep I sleep, when I eat I eat …”

In Buddhist meditation I have found a simple, unmystifying and non-suggestive form of meditation that has the aim of bringing one nearer to the Buddhist goal, that of the cessation of greed, hate, and ignorance.

The aim of Buddhist meditation is maximum awareness of our bodily and mental processes.

living. It means not to do anything in a distracted manner, but in full concentration of what is at hand, whether this is walking, eating, thinking, seeing, so that living becomes fully transparent by full awareness. “Mindfulness comprises the entire man and his whole field of experience,”

The person who has reached a state of full mindfulness is wide awake, aware of reality in its depth and concreteness; he is concentrated and not distracted.

In the case of the Buddhist practice there is no “retention” of breath or any other interference with it. There is just a quiet “bare observation” of its natural flow, with a firm and steady, but easy and “buoyant” attention, i.e., without strain or rigidity. The length or shortness of breathing is noticed, but not deliberately regulated. By regular practice, however, a calming, equalizing and deepening of the breath will result quite naturally; and the tranquillization and deepening of the breath-rhythm will lead to a tranquillization and deepening of the entire life-rhythm. In this way, Mindfulness of Breathing is an important factor of physical and mental health, though that is only incidental to the practice.[xxi]

The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.

the goal of life is to overcome greed, hate, and ignorance.

the demand for optimal awareness of the processes inside and outside oneself.

describes the function of mindfulness as “producing an increasingly greater clarity and intensity of consciousness and presenting a picture of actuality that is increasingly purged of any falsifications.”

“In that way,” he writes, “the subconsciousness will become more ‘articulate’ and more amenable to control, i.e., capable of being co-ordinated with, and helpful to, the governing tendencies of the conscious mind.

By reducing the element of the unpredictable and of the unmanageable emerging from the subconscious, self-reliance will receive a safer basis.”

I refer to “sensory awareness,” “the art of moving,” and the T’ai Chi Chuan.

The other aspect of Buddhist meditation is “greater clarity and intensity of consciousness and presenting a picture of actuality that is increasingly purged of any falsifications.”

But once more I want to emphasize that in my opinion the psychoanalytic method as a means to optimal awareness is a method in its own right and valid without any connection with Buddhist or any other method of meditation.

Freud’s theory of the conflict between libido and ego as the central conflict in man was therefore a necessary assumption,

and of the pathogenic role of unsolved conflicts.

But beyond this procrastination of decision, with the help of analysis, many of these people have other hopes, consciously or unconsciously.

One might suspect that these family and personal conflicts are put in the foreground in order to cover up the much more fundamental, severe, and painful conflicts between conscience, integrity, authenticity, and self-interest.

But this explanation is too narrow. Not only is the child powerless, the adult is powerless too. This powerlessness is rooted in the very conditions of man’s existence, in the “human situation.”

But he is unwilling to experience the pain and anguish that are inseparable from the process of growing and becoming independent.

Without effort and willingness to experience pain and anxiety, nobody grows, in fact nobody achieves anything worth achieving.

Basically, the method of this kind of interpretation is to cure by explanation; the crucial question is “Why has the neurotic symptom been formed?”

While the patient is asked to go on associating, he is engaged intellectually in the research about the origin of his symptoms.

It may begin as a therapeutic analysis but not stop when the symptoms are cured, and proceed to new goals that transcend therapy; or it may start out with a trans-therapeutic goal, where there are no significant psycho-pathological problems to be resolved.

While his aim for therapy was that of adjustment to “normal” functioning (“to be able to work and to love”), his great ambition did not lie in the field of therapy but in the creation of an enlightenment movement, based on the last step enlightenment could make:

the awareness and control of irrational passions.

The transtherapeutic goal is that of man’s self-liberation by optimal self-awareness; of the attaining of well-being, independence; of the capacity to love; and of critical, disillusioned thinking, of being rather than having.

it claims that the specific conditions of human existence and the structure of society are of more fundamental importance than the family, and that the passions motivating man are essentially not instinctive but a “second nature” of man, formed by the interaction of existential and social conditions.

the uncovering of unconscious strivings, the recognition of resistance, transference, rationalization, and the interpretation of dreams as the “royal road” to the understanding of the unconscious.

of sufficient sleep), or depressed, or angry, and then “feel around”