To a dancing God.: Sam Keen

The second step requires that i go beyond the idiosyncratic and egocentric perception of immediate experience. mature awareness is possible only when i have digested and compensated for the biases and the prejudices that are the residue of my personal history. awareness of what presents to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange. Each time i approach an object,person or event, i have the tendency to let my present needs, past experience, or expectations for the future determine what I will see. If i am to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum, I must be sufficiently aware of my preconceived ideas and characteristic emotional distortion to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into my perceptual world. This discipline of bracketing,compensating, or silencing requires sophisticated self knowledge and courageous honesty. yet, without this discipline each present moment is only the repetition of something already seen or experienced. In order for genuine novelty to emerge, for unique presence of things, persons, or even to take a root in me, I must undergo a decentralization of the ego.


life is a constant change.we have to conform to it or else we would run out of the trend of the world,we would become stagnant. likewise to searching for knowledge, we can't hold all the things that we have learned throughout our life because it is not exempted from the infinite process of change. If we want to welcome new ideas and if we want to acquire new ideas, we have to set aside our old ideas or personal preoccupation so we can give way to a new one. Just like the last sentence of the poem say, we must undergo a decentralization of the ego.

neuroticism

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life (Jung, [1961] 1989:140).

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith (Jung, [1961] 1989:140).

[Contemporary man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of neuroses. (Jung, 1964:82).

alpha lesson

life is really so ironic. You search for love but the more you search it,the harder you find it.

your are already committed,then someone would come along at a perfect wrong time…

you have given up everything for that someone but she has gave you up just for someone else…

what’s even more challenging but so painful to experience is that you have given all the love that you can give, yet they totally rejected it…

so what’s the lesson?

just learn to deal with the irony of life…