/similar_quotes/278

Showing 3 similar quotes for quote #278 from Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

Ride the Tiger
Author: Julius Evola
Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)
45

The Pauline and Faustian lament, 'two souls, alas, live in my breast,' is already an optimistic assumption; all too many have to admit, like a typical character in Hesse, that they have a multitude of souls! Nietzsche himself admitted this state of affairs when he wrote: 'One should not assume that many men are 'persons.' There are also men composed of several persons, but the majority possess none at all.' And again: 'Become yourself: an injunction addressed only to a few, and which to an even smaller number appears redundant.' One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity to oneself, the absolute, autonomous law based on one's own 'being,' when it is formulated in general and abstract terms. Everything is subject to debate - a situation accurately exemplified by characters in Dostoyevsky, like Rasholnikov or Stavrogin. At the moment when they are thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse precisely because they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their true strength. Their freedom is turned against them and destroys them; they fail at the very point at which they should have reaffirmed themselves - in their depths they find nothing to sustain them and carry them forward. We recall the words of Stavrogin's testament: 'I have tested my strength everywhere, as you advised me to do in order to know myself...What I have never seen, and still do not see, is what I should apply my strength to. My desires lack the energy; they cannot drive me. One can cross a river on a log, but not on a splinter.


The Denial of Death
Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)
313

Psychotherapy can allow people to affirm themselves, to smash idols that constrict the self-esteem, to lift the load of neurotic guilt—the extra guilt piled on top of natural existential guilt. It can clear away neurotic despair—the despair that comes from a too-constricted focus for one’s safety and satisfactions. When a person becomes less fragmented, less blocked and bottled up, he does experience real joy: the joy of finding more of himself, of the release from armor and binding reflexes, of throwing off the chains of uncritical and self-defeating dependency, of controlling his own energies, of discovering aspects of the world, intense experience in the present moment that is now freer of prefixed perceptions, new possibilities of choice and action, and so on. Yes, psychotherapy can do all these things, but there are many things it cannot do, and they have not been aired widely enough. Often psychotherapy seems to promise the moon: a more constant joy, delight, celebration of life, perfect love, and perfect freedom. It seems to promise that these things are easy to come by, once self-knowledge is achieved, that they are things that should and could characterize one’s whole waking awareness. As one patient said, who had just undergone a course in “primal scream” therapy: “I feel so fantastic and wonderful, but this is only a beginning—wait till you see me in five years, it’ll be tremendous!” We can only hope that she won’t be too unhappy. Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy—or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: “Joy!” “Awakening,” and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their peculiar brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like “Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back.” It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy. But it would also be most difficult to take the straightforward prescription for paradise on earth and make it ambiguous; one cannot be a functioning prophet with a message that he half takes back, especially if he needs paying customers and devoted admirers. The psychotherapists are caught up in contemporary culture and are forced to be a part of it. Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge. This is the promise of psychology, and for the most part the psychotherapists are obliged to live it and embody it. But it was Rank who saw how false this claim is. “Psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception,” he said, because it does not give what men want, which is immortality. Nothing could be plainer. When the patient emerges from his protective cocoon he gives up the reflexive immortality ideology that he has lived under—both in its personal-parental form (living in the protective powers of the parents or their surrogates) and in its cultural causa-sui form (living by the opinions of others and in the symbolic role-dramatization of the society). What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology—unless, said Rank, psychology itself becomes the new belief system.


The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)
0

The world has proclaimed freedom, particularly of late, and yet what do we see in this freedom of theirs: nothing but servitude and suicide! For the world says: 'You have needs, so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the wealthiest and most hihgly placed of men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even multiply them' - that is the present-day teaching of the world. In that, too, they see freedom. And what is the result of this right to the multiplication of needs? Among the rich solitariness and spiritual suicide, and among the poor - envy and murder, for while they have been given rights, they have not yet been afforded the means with which to satisfy their needs. Assurance is offered that as time goes by the world will become more united, that it will form itself into a brotherly communion by shortening distance and transmitting thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a unification of men. In construing freedom as the multiplication and speedy satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they engender within themselves many senseless and stupid desires, habits and most absurd inventions. They live solely for envy, for love of the flesh and for self-conceit. To have dinners, horses and carriages, rank, and attendants who are slaves is already such a necessity that they will even sacrifice their lives, their honour and philanthropy in order to satisfy that necessity, and will even kill themselves if they cannot do so. Among those who are not rich we see the same thing, and among the poor envy and the frustration of needs are at present dulled by drunkenness. But soon in place of alcohol it will be blood upon which they grow intoxicated - to that they are being led. I ask you: is such a man free? ...How can he desist from his habits, this slave, where can he go, if he is so accustomed to satisfying his countless needs, which he himself has invented? Solitary is he, and what concern can he have for the whole? And they have reached a point where the quantity of objects they amass is ever greater, and their joy is ever smaller.