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When you are visited by chaos and swallowed up; when nature curses you or someone you love with illness; or when tyranny rends asunder something of value that you have built, it is salutary to know the rest of the story.
Chaos is anomaly, novelty, unpredictability, transformation, disruption, and all too often, descent, as what we have come to take for granted reveals itself as unreliable.
Beyond Order explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided.
keep one foot within order while stretching the other tentatively into the beyond.
It is this instinct of meaning—something far deeper than mere thought—that orients us properly in life, so that we do not become overwhelmed by what is beyond us, or equally dangerously, stultified and stunted by dated, too narrow, or too pridefully paraded systems of value and belief.
Rule VII outlines the crucial relationship between disciplined striving in a single direction and forging of the individual character capable of resilience in the face of adversity.
people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking.
We need to talk—both to remember and to forget.
id, the instinctive part of the psyche
nature,
the superego (the sometimes oppressive, internalized representative of social order); and the ego (the I, the personality proper, crushed b...
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shadow (the dark side of the personality), the anima or animus (the contrasexual and thus often repressed side of the personality), and the self (the internal being of ideal possibility).
Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.
People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.
All that is left for you to do is watch, listen, and respond appropriately to the cues.
Compliance with those indications and reminders is, in large measure, sanity itself—and
the infinitely complex world of phenomena and fact is reduced to the functional world of value. And it is continual interaction with social institutions that makes this reduction—this specification—possible.
wrong and dangerous because those institutions have evolved to solve problems that must be solved for life to continue. They are by no means perfect—but making them better, rather than worse, is a tricky problem indeed.
The internal hierarchy that translates facts into actions mirrors the external hierarchy of social organization.
The best player is therefore not the winner of any given game but, among many other things, he or she who is invited by the largest number of others to play the most extensive series of games.
Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.
Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless.
He had accepted, and therefore transcended, his role as a beginner. He had ceased being casually cynical about the place he occupied in the world and the people who surrounded him, and accepted the structure and the position he was offered.
Through friendship and collegial relationships we modify our selfish proclivities, learning not to always put ourselves first.
It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.
Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished.
genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power.
It is also because arrogance bars the path to learning. Shortsighted, willfully blind, and narrowly selfish tyrants certainly exist, but they are by no means in the majority, at least in functional societies. Otherwise nothing would work.
decent people take in the ability to provide opportunities to those over whom they currently exercise authority.
Accepting the fact of this disequilibrium and striving forward nonetheless—whether presently at the bottom, middle, or top—is an important element of mental health.
Thoughtless repetition of what sufficed in the past—or,
How do we establish a balance between reasonable conservatism and revitalizing creativity?
It is this corruption of power that is strongly objected to by those on the liberal/left side of the political spectrum, and rightly so.
Making that distinction requires the capacity and the willingness to observe and differentiate, rather than mindless reliance on ideological proclivity.
You may even have to crawl before you can walk. This is part of accepting your position as a beginner,
first, for example, that discipline—subordination to the status quo, in one form or another—needs to be understood as a necessary precursor to creative transformation, rather than its enemy.
what is good cannot be simply encapsulated by mindless or rigid rule following,
“Follow rules except when doing so undermines the purpose of those selfsame rules—in which case take the risk of acting in a manner contrary to what has been agreed upon as moral.”
follow the rules until you are capable of being a shining exemplar of what they represent, but break them when those very rules now constitute the most dire impediment to the embodiment of their central virtues. And
These stories portray the existential dilemma that eternally characterizes human life: it is necessary to conform, to be disciplined, and to follow the rules—to do humbly what others do; but it is also necessary to use judgment, vision, and the truth that guides conscience to tell what is right, when the rules suggest otherwise.
In Rule I, we discussed the idea that the true winner of any game is the person who plays fair.
player, like the Seeker, indomitably pursues what is most valuable in the midst of complex, competing obligations.
The Seeker is therefore the person who is playing the game that everyone else is playing (and who is disciplined
and expert at the game), but who is also playing an additional, higher-order game: the pursuit of what is of primary significance.
The phenomena that grip us (phenomena: from the Greek word phainesthai, “to appear, or to be brought to light”) are like lamps along a dark path: they are part of the unconscious processes devoted to integrating and furthering the development of our spirits, the furtherance of our psychological development.
You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you.
Which is why many things didn't work
Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process.
The Rebis is a symbol of the fully developed personality that can emerge from forthright and courageous pursuit of what is meaningful (the round chaos) and dangerous and promising (the dragon).
reality as objective world
It is the actual, particular, and unique demise of someone you love, for example, compared to the listing of that death in the hospital records.
