It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

• terror
• early childhood development
• psychology
• meaning
• existentialism
• existence
• self-confidence
• fear
• mercy
• time
• self
• routine
• character
• activity

to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem.

• consciousness
• self-awareness
• psychology
• religion
• terror
• self-deception
• self-confidence
• life
• self
• heroism