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directly and naturally perceive reality as personified, and then must work very diligently to strip that personification away, so that we can detect “objective reality.”
the hero is the embodied principle of action and perception that must rule over all the primordial psychological elements of lust, rage, hunger, thirst, terror, and joy.
to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be.
That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.
A voluntary death-and-rebirth transformation—the change necessary to adapt when terrible things emerge—is therefore a solution to the potentially fatal rigidity of erroneous certainty, excessive order, and stultification.
Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value. Without it, everything sinks into meaninglessness and boredom or degenerates and spirals into terror, anxiety, and pain.
The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms.
In this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.
Here is the problem: Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated.
Every trivial but chronic disagreement about cooking, dishes, housecleaning, responsibility for finances, or frequency of intimate contact will be duplicated, over and over, unless you successfully address it.
to self-deception.
Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the
denial
Mechanisms
However, neither reality nor our processing of reality is as objective or articulated as Freud presupposed.
protected from the revelation of your insufficiency by your refusal to make yourself clear.
purposelessness.
First, noting, much less communicating, feelings of (petty) anger or pain due to lonesomeness,
The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability. Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced and, in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction.
It requires the willingness to change, which is almost always indistinguishable from the decision to leave something (or someone, or some idea) behind.
Unfortunately, in the longer term, this willful blindness leaves life murky and foggy; leaves it void, unseen, without form, confused—and leaves you bewildered and astonished.
If you pile up enough junk in your closet, one day, when you are least prepared, the door will spring open, and all of what has been packed inside, growing inexorably in the darkness, will bury you, and you may not have enough time or energy left in your life to confront it, sort through it, keep what you need, and discard the rest.
If you truly wanted, perhaps you would receive, if you asked. If you truly sought, perhaps you would find what you seek. If you knocked, truly wanting to enter, perhaps the door would open. But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.
NOTICE THAT OPPORTUNITY LURKS WHERE RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN ABDICATED
you might still notice that your unproductive coworkers are leaving a plethora of valuable tasks undone. You might then ask yourself, “What would happen if I took responsibility for doing them?” It
I think that is the secret to the reason for Being itself: difficult is necessary.
Frequently, in my clinical practice—and in my personal life—I observed that people did not get what they needed (or, equally importantly perhaps, what they wanted) because they never made it clear to themselves or others what that was. It is impossible to hit a target, after all, unless you aim at it.
The trick, so to speak, is to trade that early possibility for something meaningful, productive, long term, and sustainable. Peter Pan refuses to do so.
the attractive potential of a directionless but talented twenty-five-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at thirty, and downright past its expiration date at forty.
And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?
The pessimism? Even if you are called by God Himself to venture out into the world, as Abraham was, life is going to be exceptionally difficult. Even under the best of all conceivable circumstances, almost insuperable obstacles will emerge and obstruct your path. The encouragement? You will have the opportunity to reveal yourself as much stronger and more competent than you might imagine.
Thus, when the center will no longer hold—even at the darkest hour—new possibility makes itself manifest. It is for this reason that the archetypal Hero is born when things are at their worst.
This is courage itself: the refusal to shrink from what makes itself known, no matter how terrible it seems.
The young god and rightful heir to the throne sees the opportunity lurking where responsibility has been abdicated, and is unwilling to look away.
Does what you are attempting compel you forward, without being too frightening? Does it grip your interest, without crushing you? Does it eliminate the burden of time passing? Does it serve those you love and, perhaps, even bring some good to your enemies? That is responsibility.
The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.
to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.
If you are going to take care of yourself, you are already burdened (or privileged) with a social responsibility. The you for whom you are caring is a community that exists across time. The necessity for considering this society of the individual, so to speak, is a burden and an opportunity that seems uniquely characteristic of human beings.
narrow selfishness is destined to be nonproductive. It is for this reason, among others, that a strictly individualist ethic is a contradiction in terms. There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself—once you realize that you are a community that extends across time—and how you should treat other people.
Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future.
“What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?” The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.
If the cost of betraying yourself, in the deepest sense, is guilt, shame, and anxiety, the benefit of not betraying yourself is meaning—the meaning that sustains.
start acting in accordance with your conscience. You decide that it is a partner, despite its adversarial form.
What is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life? The highest possible goal.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder.
Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment.
If you wish instead to be engaged in a great enterprise—even if you regard yourself as a mere cog—you are required not to do things you hate.
That rejection—that betrayal of soul—is truly the requirement to perform demonstrably counterproductive, absurd, or pointless work;
all the Judeo-Christian values serving as the foundation of Western civilization had been made dangerously subject to casual rational criticism, and that the most important axiom upon which they were predicated—the existence of a transcendent, all-powerful deity—had been fatally challenged.
we would experience an existentially devastating rise in nihilism, Nietzsche believed. Alternatively, he suggested, people would turn to identification with rigid, totalitarian ideology: the substitute of human ideas for the transcendent Father of All Creation.
Individuals who take this route, this alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism, must therefore produce their own cosmology of values.
