What is the foundational knowledge required for me to learn this?

• Existentialism
• Jungian Psychology

What ACTIONS/HABITS will I partake after reading this book?

• The day after I finished reading this book, I officially moved out of my parent’s house and lived life 100% from my own choices

What Questions do I have after reading this book?

What Phrase(s) can I add/validate to my mantras?

• Courage is found in the small, iterative, hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility
• The opposite of courage is conformity
• The issues of society are a reflection of man’s weak and undeveloped inner strength and lack of self of identity
• Aliveness often means the capacity to not act, but to instead be creatively idle–which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something.
• A single person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.
• All man’s history is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness
  • All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone
  • In the same way we may lose the distinction between wakefulness and sleep when sleep-deprived, we may lose the distinction between the subjective self and the objective world around us when we are socially deprived. The people in our lives orient us. Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him.
• Anxiety is helplessness/powerlessness in the face of an unidentified adversity; not knowing the threat, and therefore not knowing what plan of action to take; The great bulk of our anxiety comes when some value we hold essential to our existence as selves is threatened
• we experience ourselves as a thinking-intuitive-feeling and acting unity
• Energy is Eternal Delight. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence
• The path towards the self in a journey that begins with rediscovery–that is to imply, that with which we were previously intimate, but have forgotten.
• Freedom is never the opposite of responsibility; nor is it the absence of a plan–it is the free will to accept responsibility on your own terms
• Freedom is the opportunity to realize even greater human values through man’s capacity to direct his own development by adopting greater responsibility in proportion to his greater self-awareness
• Matthew 10:36, “And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”
• The path to self is not only about learning to feel, experience, and desire, but to fight against what prevents us from loving outwardly and creating independently while actively (rather than passively) struggling to achieve our dream of freedom as a person in our own right.
  • we must kill-off the infantile ties of dependency which binds the person to the parents, and thereby keeps him from loving outwardly and creating independently.
  • “I have fallen in love outward”–the final phrase of Orestes as he leaves the city, representing the goal of man’s psychological integration
• The hardest step in developing courage is accepting full responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though his wisdom is both limited and imperfect; for it is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and he may very well be wrong!
• The temptation to be “sheltered”, to regress, to be “passive” and “blunted”, are symbolized by the natural tendency to go back to the womb, and that maturity and freedom as an individual are the opposite tendencies
• When one consciously chooses to live, two things happen: (1) His responsibility for himself takes on a new meaning.
  • He accepts responsibility for his own life not as something with which he was forcibly burden with (“I didn’t choose to be born”); but as something he has chosen for himself
  • For this reason, himself now exists as a result of a decision he himself has made
• Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by blind necessity but by choice
  • This also means that the acceptance of limitations need not at all be a reason to give up, but can and should be a constructive act of freedom.
  • Two groups of people may be sick, or have short height, or have two left feet. One group will always give up and dwell in self-pitty. The other group will recognize the event as something that happens for them rather than to them, and actively struggle to enlarge their self-knowledge and freedom
  • Freedom does not mean trying to live in isolation. But it does mean that when one is able to confront his isolation, he is able consciously to choose to act, with some responsibility, in the structure of his relations with the world of other persons around him.

Summary

One sentence summary

The greatest good that we can contribute to society over the long run starts at the individual level by cultivating a strong sense of inner identity and finding the center of strength within ourselves; a single person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.

One Paragraph Summary

The Issue at hand

The symptoms of anxiety and loneliness are a result of deficiencies from within, rather than social prohibitions–leading to a sense of inner emptiness that people attempt to fill with external social expectations. People are living passively and avoiding taking responsibility because man has lost touch with what he feels and wants, calling us to begin introspectively asking what we want and living a life that aligns with those desires by molding a wholistic personality that unifies these qualities that make us individuals.

The struggle that lies ahead

The struggle towards selfhood and freedom is primarily an internal conflict where we choose to remove the dependencies that tie us down at the cost of our individual freedom. On one hand, the temptation to be “sheltered”, to regress, to be “passive” and “blunted”, are symbolized by the natural tendency to go back to the warm and familiar womb and “waste inward” our self potentialities; on the other hand, maturity and freedom as an individual are the opposite tendencies, and these lead to the psychological integration of “falling in love outward” or the great empathy of loving thy neighbor as thyself. The man who pursues his self development accepts responsibility for his own life as something he has chosen for himself and sees discipline as necessary for the sake of values he wishes to realize; he admits and is aware of the fact that his motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as he learns in the future, yet it is this admission of one’s ignorance that marks the beginning of wisdom through which he can creatively use his powers to transcend his limitations only as he humbly and honestly as he admits these limitations to begin with.

The impact of our development on ourselves, other people, and the world around us

This active internal struggle towards selfhood can lead to the discovery of a higher consciousness from which new powers are granted. we may see truth as it presents itself, love others by appreciating and affirming their potentialities without demand for ourselves, and create in ecstasy that occurs when were are totally observed in what we are doing. The man with a strong self identity has the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self; he develops his conscience to tap deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity, and awareness in which tradition and immediate experience are interrelated. The man with the strong identity lives in the present moment, for he realizes that to love reality means to be present in the current moment. For that reason, he does not wait for things to happen, but goes out and makes it happen, right at this moment.

Above all else, COURAGE!

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom borne from the actualization of one’s own nature. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependance to new levels of freedom and integration; the power to let go of the familiar and the secure. Courage is found in the small, iterative, hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. The hardest step in developing courage is accepting full responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though his wisdom is both limited and imperfect; for it is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and he may very well be wrong!

The reason we do not see truth is because we do not have enough courage; truth is often missed not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again some preconceived opinion that looks or sounds familiar. To find the truth, and consequently the answers to one’s questions, one must have the courage to venture into the unknown and risk discovering what one hates to see. He must have courage to interrogate himself and his beliefs without mercy. Seeing truth is a function not of the separate intellect, but of the whole man: one experiences truth in moving ahead as a thinking-feeling-acting unity.

Part 1: Our Predicament

Chapter 1: The Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man

Summary

One Sentence Summary

The issues of society are a reflection of man’s weak and undeveloped inner strength and lack of self of identity.

One paragraph Summary

Rollo May notices a period of high anxiety and existentialism among people of the 1950s; while many would point outward toward WWII, economic depression, and social prohibitions as the cause of this psychological distress, May suggests that these are merely outward symptoms of underlying conditions within our society–specifically at the individual level. These symptoms of anxiety and loneliness are a result of deficiencies from within, rather than social prohibitions–leading to a sense of inner emptiness that people attempt to fill with external social expectations. The result is a group of people who live passively, have trouble deciding on important matters such as marriage and vocations, and a general sense of apathy towards life. May suggest that man has lost touch with what he feels and wants, calling us to begin introspectively asking what we want and living a life that aligns with that desire. Society is beneficial because it grans us social relationships and social roles that help orient us towards our sense of self–problems only arise in extreme conditions when we either derive our strength from conformity or become detached from reality from excessive isolation.

The Hollow Man

Something to keep in mind: This book was published in 1953 (after WWII).

These were the common issues that plagued the US in the 1950s:

• Threat of war
• the draft
• economic uncertainty

And here are the symptoms that May notices among his patients:

• unhappiness
• inability to decide or make decisions (marriage or vocations)
• general despair
• meaninglessness in their lives
• feelings of powerlessness

So, May begins to wonder: What are the root problems beneath these symptoms?

In this section, May dives straight into his answer: The chief problem of the people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

This is not an issue of people not knowing what they want, rather it’s an issue of people not knowing what they feel.

According to May, the underlying problem behind people’s inability to make decisions is that they have no definite experience of their own desires or wants.

A classic example that illustrates this issue is romantic relationships. Ray’s patients seem to have an inability to form committed relationships, with some relationships ending prematurely before marriage, and others simply becoming dissatisfied with their partners. So what’s the issue? These couples expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn’t–in other words, their expectations of did not match the reality.

These same people can generally talk fluently about what they should want, but it becomes evident that they are describing what others, parents, professors, employers expect of them rather than what they want for themselves.

As one patient puts it: “I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me”.

Naturally, we may begin to point the finger at society; Freud made it clear that secretive desires (e.g. sexual desires) needed to be released from repression and somehow integrated properly into reality.

However, even in 1950s, opportunities for sexual gratification could be found with relative ease (“The Pill”, or oral contraceptive pill, took off in the years after this book, during the 1960s). May argues that the sexual problems people brought during his time were rarely struggles against social prohibitions. So, if social prohibitions were not the issue, what does May claim the real issue was?

May claims that these people suffered from deficiencies from within; they lacked potency and the capacity to have strong feelings in responding to the sexual partner. Sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical, and vacuous experience.

So what is this emptiness that May speaks of? It can generally be regarded as an inability to know what one feels or wants.

So what set of conditions seem to bring about this emptiness that’s within people? Again, many people may begin pointing externally, and pointing the finger to the uncertainty of times following post WWII. May acknowledges that indeed, the post-war uncertainty has a rol in this, but that alone would be a shallow explanation.

May believes that the post-war uncertainty, or really any time period that faced a major threat to stability, were largely symptoms of underlying conditions within our society.

May’s Evidence: Can we really trust input from therapy patients?

Before May goes deeper into explaining the root cause of this emptiness, he brings up a clarification on his observations. Since many of May’s encounters deal with people who voluntarily pursue psychological help, some may argue that perhaps these people are not a representative sample of the entire US health?

In May’s defense, he claims the contrary: that those who seek psychological help are often the more sensitive and gifted members of society.

From May’s perspective, those who come to his clinic need help because they are less successful at rationalizing than the “well-adjusted” citizen (who is able follow the rules of society while covering up his underlying conflicts).

May illustrates his claim by analyzing the patients who first encountered Freud in the 1890s; during this time, most people believed that sex was repugnant and should be covered up as much as possible. Ironically enough, in the years following the first world war, the 1920s experienced an epidemic of overtly sexual problems. And this is perhaps where Freud gets his credibility–his work with his patients enabled him to predict this sexual frustration that followed in the later decades.

Going back to May’s defense on the validity of his client’s experiences, we now come equipped with the perspective that a relatively small number of people provide a very revealing and significant barometer of the conflicts and tensions under the psychological surface of society.

Indeed, this “barometer” should be taken seriously, as it is one of the best indexes of the disruptions and problems which have not yet, but may soon, break out widely in society.

May’s Evidence: Sociological Data

Outside of the consulting rooms of psychologists and psychoanalysts, May also looked at sociological data. In particular, the book “The Lonely Crowd” by David Riesman discovers his same emptiness before the first world war.

These so-called “gyroscope men”, are “inner-directed” and could be detected by the following characteristics:

• Taken over the standards he was taught
• Moralistic in the late Victorian sense
• Strong motives and ambitions that were derived from outside
• Gain strength by
  • internalizing external rules
  • Compartmentalizing will power and intellect
  • repressing their feelings
• Often well-suited for business success
• Mechanical (“gyroscope” center of stability)
• Rigidity, dogmatism, and inability to learn and to change
• pseudo “inner strength”
• Eventually self-defeating
• “inner direction” a moralistic substitute for integrity rather than integrity itself

These “gyroscope men” lived by the stability of an “inner gyroscope”, and were often emotionally repressed people directed by a strong superego. The attitudes and behaviors of these men are examples of how certain attitudes in society tend to crystallize rigidly just before they collapse; a period of emptiness would naturally follow this breakdown of the “iron men”.

(Side note: How does this relate to the phrase “strong men, good times; good times, weak men; weak men, bad times; bad times, strong men; and the cycle continues”?)

Personally, the people who come to mind are perhaps the “naturally born” republican kids, who grow up becoming fiercely loyal to an ideology that is strongly directed by environment.

Meanwhile, the people of the 1950s post WWII are described by Riesman as “outer-directed” in that they seek no to stand out, but to conform and fit in.

Metaphorically speaking, these “outer-directed” are like “radar men”, who constantly scan the environment for how they should act–the same way people with a set of mirrors simply reflect what others wish to see.

• characterized by passivity and apathy
• wish to be accepted by their peers, even to the extent of being inconspicuous and absorbed in the group

What does the empty archetype look like?

What’s the best illustration of the empty man?

• Suburban man
• get up at the same hour every weekday morning
• takes the same train to work
• performs the same task in the office
• lunches at the same place
• leaves the same tip for the waitress each day
• comes home from the same train each night
• has 2.3 children
• cultivates a little garden
• goes to church every Christmas and Easter
• moves through a routine, mechanical existence year after year until he finally retires at 65, and very soon thereafter dies of heart failure possibly brought on by repressed hostility (I think Joe Rogan once mentioned a quote that read, “Most men suffer in silence”)
• Looks up to the bold people who go outside the lines of society and live on their own terms
  • These “hollow men” endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff–either from themselves or by identifying with someone else’s blowoff

And this widespread emptiness is far more insidious than what we could imagine; widespread drug addictions are just one of those manifested symptoms of this inner emptiness. The human beng cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despairs, and eventually into self-destructive activities.

Back to the main question: What causes this source of Emptiness?

The feeling of emptiness generally comes from people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in.

Side note: this is perhaps why Jordan Peterson is such a big advocate for people seeking power and to become dangerous–this is a creative force that empowers the individual to direct his life as he chooses.

Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction toward himself, other people, and the world around him; he believes that he cannot act as an entity in directing his own life, nor change other people’s attitude toward him, nor influence the world around him.

Consequently, it is this powerlessness that leads him to despair and futility. Without much action, he begins to feel no real difference, and give sup wanting and feeling, resulting in apathy and lack of feeling as a defense against anxiety. When a persona continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers :(

What’s the big picture impact of emptiness?

When individual emptiness mixes with societal conformity, we get blind mobs of people with no purpose blindly following the next blind person. This calamity makes society at large vulnerable to fascist dictatorships like Nazi Germany to come in and fill in this empty void the same way people seek romantic relationships to fill in the emptiness.

Loneliness

The feelings of emptiness and loneliness go together because they are both a reflection weak inner strength.

How do people react when feeling anxious?

For example, when a person does not know with any inner conviction what he wants nor what he feels, as a result of a period of traumatic change, be becomes aware of the fact that the conventional desires and goals he has been taught to follow no longer bring him any security or give him any sense of direction, when, that is, he feels an inner void while he stands amid the outer confusion of upheaved in his society, he senses danger; and his natural reaction is to look around for people.

Why does he look outward for other people? Because he hopes they will give him some sense of direction, or at least some comfort in the knowledge that he is not alone in his fright. This is really no different than the natural instinct in animals to stick together in hurds, to be protected as one pack.

Emptiness and loneliness are thus two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety.

What is the purpose of social relations for Man’s self?

Author Norman Cousins wrote in his book, “Modern Man Is Obsolete”, “All man’s history is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness”–or as French philosopher Blaise Pascal would say, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”.

Another reason for man’s dependance on others is that the human being gets his original experience of being a self out of his relatedness to other people; when he is alone, without other persons, he is afraid he will lose his experience of being a self.

Said differently, man receives his consciousness of himself, which is the basis of his capacity to orient himself in life, from these relationships. Part of the feeling of loneliness is that man needs relations with other people in order to orient himself.

The fear of being alone derives much of its terror from our anxiety lest we lose our awareness of ourselves.

In the same way we may lose the distinction between wakefulness and sleep when sleep-deprived, we may lose the distinction between the subjective self and the objective world around us when we are socially deprived.

The people in our lives orient us. Every human being gets much of his sense of his own reality out of what others say to him and think about him.

BUT! The key difference May notes during this time period is one of extreme dependence on others for their feeling of reality–to the point where they would fear losing their own sense of existence without the input from others.

This is not to say that isolation is inherently bad, nor to say that socializing is inherently bad either–both qualities can yield great results when balanced correctly, at the right time, while avoiding extremes.

The real threat of loneliness

The threat of extreme isolation is psychosis (Side note: I personally experienced this when I lived out in the middle of no where in solitude. The longer I went, the less “human” I stared acting. I would not recommend.)

When a person is on the brink of psychosis, they often have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings because it gives them a bridge to reality (side note: again, my experience confirms this. It seems like the body will naturally gravitate to what it actually needs, cool how that works out).

So really, this root issue that people are avoiding by playing the “well-liked” game is to protect against psychosis. Because when one’s customary ways of orienting himself on the social hierarchy are threatened, and one is without other selves around, such a person is thrown back on inner resources and inner strength–it is these same resources and strength from within that modern man has neglected to develop.

All of this seems to validate the idea that loneliness is indeed a real, rather than imaginary, to such people lacking inner strength.

Escaping loneliness is nothing new

Pascal in the seventeenth century observed the great efforts of people to divert themselves, and he opined that the purpose fo the bulk of these diversions was to enable people to avoid thoughts of themselves.

But what made the 1950s special is that the fear of loneliness is much more extensive, and the defenses against it (seeking to be “well-liked”, by whatever means of socializing) are more ridged and compulsive.

Another important aspect is the great emphasis society places on being socially accepted.

To be socially accepted is the “mark of prestige”–proof that we are “socially successful” by being forever sought after and by never being alone.

If one is well-liked (socially successful) one will rarely be physically alone; to not be liked is to have lost out in the race. The famous phrase of the time that reflects this motto is Willie Loman’s “Death of a Salesman”, where he uses the phrase, “Be well-liked and you will never be alone”.

As we can see, social acceptance, or being “well-liked” is a defense against the underlying threat of psychosis resulting from a weak inner strength.

Anxiety and the Threat to the self

It is erroneous to think that wars and economic depressions cause anxiety; rather our anxiety is often the cause of these events–they are symptoms of the same underlying cause.

May brings up the example of Fascism and Nazi totalitarianism. When a nation is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, it takes one charismatic and passionate individual with a definite plan to fill in the vacuum; the people end up selling their freedom in exchange for their anxiety.

The same can happen in the US during heated politics; when a group suffers continuous anxiety, with no agreed-on constructive steps to take, its members sooner or later turn against each other. May uses the example fo McCarthyism to illustrate the heightened anxiety that led to a nation turning against itself.

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is helplessness/powerlessness in the face of an unidentified adversity; not knowing the threat, and therefore not knowing what plan of action to take.

(Side note: This is why a problem written down is HALF-SOLVED!!!)

What’s more, anxiety is a threat to our existence as a whole being, rather than the existence of a subset of ourselves (e.g. a broken arm may hurt, but it does not threaten a person’s existence).

The great bulk of our anxiety comes when some value we hold essential to our existence as selves is threatened.

Tying back to the idea of being “well-liked”–it’s the same idea of challenging someone’s position in the social hierarchy. There is great anxiety when people believe they’re position in society is challenged, because of that lingering threat of psychosis from a weak inner strength–thereby creating this constant sense of anxiety.

(Side note: how does this idea compare with the teaching of Budda on “letting go” of past identifies?)

Anxiety has the same effect as psychosis; it disorients man, wiping out, temporarily, hsi knowledge of what and who he is, and blurring his view of reality around him.

The antidote to anxiety

Just as anxiety destroys our self-awareness, so awareness of ourselves can destroy anxiety. In other words, the stronger our consciousness of ourselves, the more we can take a strand against and overcome anxiety.

Anxiety, like a fever, is a sign that an inner struggle is in progress; it is evidence that a psychological or spiritual batter is going on. So long as this conflict is present, there is an open possibility that we can becomes aware of the causes of the conflict, and find a solution on a higher level of health.

Anxiety is simply nature’s way of indicating to us that we need to solve a problem.

The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrounded; the greater our self-strength (our capacity to persevere our awareness of ourselves and the objective world around us) the less we will be overcome by the threat.

Our task, then, is to strength our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us.

Chapter 1 Reading Comprehension questions from ChatGPT

Questions

1. What is the main theme or subject matter of the first chapter?
2. According to Rollo May, what is the primary cause of the current crisis of identity?
3. How does May define “identity” in the context of his book?
4. What are some examples of “pseudosolutions” that people often turn to in an attempt to find their identity
5. According to May, what role does society play in shaping our identity?
6. Describe May’s concept of “inner identity” and its significance.
7. What does May mean by the phrase “the role of the innocent bystander”?
8. How does May suggest that individuals can begin to find their true identity?

Answers

1. The main theme of the first chapter is an introduction towards the concepts of emptiness and looniness, and the call for action on our part as readers to begin looking inwards towards what we truly desire and wish to experience in life
2. The primary cause of the curries crisis of identity is emptiness. Specifically, people have lost touch with what they feel and truly want. As a result, people act as “mirror reflections” or each other in the hopes of being “well-liked” by everyone. But deep down, man is simply “going through the mechanical motions” of life.
3. Identity, according to May, involves a deep exploration of one’s inner being (our desires, values, and authentic interests) rather than passively conforming to external expectations. Finding the “identity” is a process of self-discovery and self-understanding through both introspection and retrospection, as opposed to merely accepting societal norms or trying to fit into predetermined roles.
4. “pseudosolutions” of finding identity includes May’s concept of the “gyroscope man”. These are people who have a false “inner strength” that is really based on compartmentalization and repression of one’s true desires while blindly following the rules, values, and traditions passed on from previous generations without questioning them or considering their own authentic needs. These people end up rigid and inflexible, unable to adapt, change, and grow as the climate of time inevitably changes.
5. Society, specifically our relationship to people, orient us in life. Man gets his original experience of being a self our of his relatedness to other people. It is through these social relationships and the role we play in society that man gets his original experience of being a self out of his relatedness to other people. In the absence of people, and the onset of looniness, man’s self is at threat, and the risk of psychosis from losing our awareness of ourselves becomes a major issue.
6. “Inner identity” is simply self-awareness; this includes aspects of our genuine interests, values, and ambitions.
7. Note: I don’t know if the concept of “innocent bystander” was mentioned in the book, but I liked GPT’s response enough to include it here as reference.

" In summary, the role of the innocent bystander refers to passive conformity and reliance on external influences to determine one’s identity, which May argues hinders personal growth and self-discovery.

In May’s book, “Man’s Search for Himself,” he introduces the concept of “the role of the innocent bystander.” This concept refers to individuals who passively observe and conform to societal expectations without critically engaging with their own desires and values. They become mere spectators in their own lives, allowing others to dictate their identity and choices.

May argues that the role of the innocent bystander is problematic because it stifles individual autonomy and self-discovery. By relinquishing their active agency, individuals fail to develop a genuine sense of self and rely on external influences to define their identity. They become disconnected from their own aspirations, leading to a sense of emptiness and the loss of personal fulfillment.

May encourages individuals to resist the role of the innocent bystander and instead actively participate in shaping their own identity. This involves

• questioning societal norms
• reflecting on personal values
• engaging in introspection to discover one’s true self

By taking an active role in their own lives, individuals can break free from the constraints of the bystander role and find a more authentic and fulfilling path. " 8. Periods of solitude for introspection and retrospection are merely starting points towards man’s search for himself (his true identity). The next steps include embracing one’s one unique desires and aspirations by actively seeking out experiences that align with their inner selves.

Chapter 2: The Roots of Our Malady

Summary

One Sentence Summary

The chapter explores the reasons behind the current age of anxiety and emptiness, attributing it to the loss of personal freedom and identity in favor of conforming to societal norms, a shift in values, diminished means of self-expression, and a disconnection from nature, suggesting that the solution lies in reevaluating and rediscovering individual uniqueness and values to cultivate inner strength to benefit society.

One Paragraph Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to ask the question: what basic changes are occurring to make this an age of anxiety and emptiness? How can history help explain this issue?

When we speak of loss of the sense of self, we are speaking of people who have scarified their personal freedom and identity for the conformity of the herd.

And why would these people make such a decision? Why would we willingly sacrifice our genuine interests, dreams, ambitions, and desires for a herd mentality that leaves us feeling empty? Here are four main reasons:

1. The loss in the belief in the worth of a person as a result of feeling powerless in creating their own life and unaware of what they want and feel leads these same people to sacrifice their self identity for perceived herd direction and mentality.
2. People, understandingly so, become frustrated by the seemingly sudden change in “how to play the game” of life because the center of values for society have shifted. Naturally, this leads to this emptiness and question of values–what should we aim for, in this void of values that no longer serve us?
3. A diminished quality in the means of communicating our selves that enhance our experience of spiritual isolation and loneliness, in our inability to both feel the significance of our language as well as express it for others to understand.
4. Our loss in the ability to relate to nature is a reflection of modern man’s loss in his own self.

The solution is to reevaluation and rediscover. Rediscovering the unique powers and initiative of each individual. Revaluation and transevaluation of all values as an act of ultimate self-examination for mankind by thinking deeply to ask ourselves what we individually truly value. Molding a wholistic personality that unifies the qualities that make us us. It is this quality, May argues, that will result in the greatest good to society over the long run–that is, a single person with a well developed inner strength.

The loss of the center of values in our society

The purpose of this chapter is to ask the question: what basic changes are occurring to make this an age of anxiety and emptiness? To begin discussion, we analyze the historical trends of the past.

Similar to the ideas presented in the book, “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, the 1950s represent a period of changing social values and goals.

May outlines two values that are in a state of transition:

• Individual competition
• Reason

Both of these values have guided much of the development of the western world since the age of the Renaissance.

Unlearning Individual Competition

Individual competition is the classic laissez-faire theory in economics that advocates for men to further their own economic self-interest, which in turn results in a macro effect that maximized the economic interest of the entire community.

However, the industrial revolution of the 18th century led to the growth and development of big businesses and monopolies in the later centuries–leading people to question how they can become individual competitors in the face of giant conglomerates. This transformed the individual worker from a solitary worker to a professional belonging to a bigger entity such as a big corporation or university system.

In the process, people have had to unlearn the idea of individual competition in exchange for the learning of collective cooperation.

It’s vital to note that May is NOT suggesting we dismiss individual effort and initiative–rather the unique powers and initiative of each individual must be rediscovered. But more on that later.

The mindset of individual competition becomes troublesome during this transition period when a social welfare was not yet developed. This old idea mixed with competition from big companies led to the mindset that a loss on one person is a gain on another person’s scramble towards the top of the ladder. Consequently, the psychological problems that resulted from this undeveloped idea included increased anxiety and isolation for each other–since each person was seen as a potential rival or enemy.

May brings up the work of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; where the protagonist of the story attempts to conceal his competitive attitude with a facade of being “well-liked”. The protagonist, realizing that what he has been taught no longer works with the changing policies of his company, begins to fail miserably (again, this is the rigidity and inflexibility of the “gyroscope man”) until finally he decides to take matters into his own hands by committing suicide. The ending remark from his son was, “he never knew who he was”.

Note: Always remember that suicide is a permanent solution to temporary situation–it’s always best to weather the storm and persist during these downfalls, as it will teach you more about yourself than any other period in your life.

Unlearning Reason

Throughout the early centuries, reason worked well to advance the state of science and education. To many people, the idea of reason also implied “universal reason”; it was man’s challenge to discover these universal principles from which man could live a happy life.

It was during the 19th century were we witness a gradual split up of reason from “emotion” and “will”.

Prior to Descartes’ work, man help the following perspectives:

• Reason would give the answer to any problem
• will power was putting the answers from reason into effect
• emotions generally got in the way of things, so they were repressed

These attitudes led to the transition of reason into intellectualistic rationalization, where we find conflicts between instinct, ego, and superego (and later comes Freud to the rescue!).

When Spinoza in the 17th century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the whole man–this in in contrast to the splitting of the personality the comes form intellectualistic rationalization.

Intellectualistic rationalization would ask the question, “should I follow reason or give away to sensual passions and needs, or be faithful to my ethical duty”, whereas someone sharing Spinoza’s perspective would ask,

“How does the unity of my mind with the whole of existence impact my perception of self, my understanding of truth, and my ethical considerations?”

It’s not without standing that the emphasis of one person getting ahead of the other greatly blocks the possibilities of loving one’s neighbor.

The splitting up of the personality

Questions such as “Why does economic striving need to be against one’s fellow men?”, or “Why does reason need to be against emotion?” each bring up good points.

It’s important to realize that the characteristic of a period of change is precisely that everyone does ask the wrong questions.

Why? Because the old goals, criteria, and principles are still habitually set in our minds–it is this resistance to establish a new habit of thinking that leads people to ask questions which never could lead to the right answer.

It is this inability to completely change oneself that leads people to inadequate solutions in search of the truth:

• “reason” operates while goes to class
• “emotion” operates when one visits a lover
• “will power” operates when studying for an exam

Yet it is this compartmentalization of values and goals that quickly leads to undermining the unity of the personality (the self) into “pieces” within as well as without–leading many without direction as to which way to go (hence the anxiety).

Freud was among the few men who recognized this splitting of the personality and encouraged men to seek unity for our lives.

The typical archetype of the person with split personalities is as follows:

• A husband who goes off to business
• He keeps his work and his family in different compartments
• He treats his wife like a doll
• Note: this is a reference to Ibsen’s A Doll House play

Personal Question: I wonder how this relates to Alan Watts’ claim “view everything you do as play, and do not make a distinction between work and play” as well as Jeff Bezos’ ideal of a “work-life integration” rather than “work-life balance”.

What many people don’t understand is that people like Freud, Ibsen, and Cézanne were not profits of a new generation, rather the last great men of a previous generation who coasted on the goals of their time. These men lived and experienced a time before the emptiness.

Solutions from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Prophecy

Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka are among the people who foresaw the destruction of values and the emptiness that would follow in the 20th century. Each of these men saw that we cannot ride on the goals of the past.

Technology advances so quickly, that Nietzsche was the first to point out that man’s great advancements without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding would lead to Nihilism.

What Nietzsche is emphasizing is the loss of values from society; in the absence of newfound values to deal with the changing times, society falls into the same tyranny and waves of massacres that we witness from WWII.

So what’s the solution? A revaluation and transevaluation of all values as an act of ultimate self-examination for mankind.

Stated simply: we ought to think deeply and reevaluate what we value, and that starts at the individual level.

Values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move.

Having a framework of values and principles enables us to choose the right goals and ambitions to pursue.

The Loss of the sense of self

The loss of the self is a result of the over-reliance on the herd.

In the face of totalitarian movements and uncontrolled economic depressions, we tend to feel smaller as persons. This leads to people forming the habitual mental story that they are insignificant and powerless, and rightly so, because pragmatically, how can anyone go up against the economic and political movements of the mid 20th century?

The authoritarianism of the 20th century was largely accepted NOT because many people explicitly believed in it, rather because they feel themselves individually powerless, anxious, and empty.

It is precisely this loss of self, this loss in the belief in the worth of a person, that causes these mass social and political movements. The loss of self and the rise of collectivist movement are both the result of the same underlying, historical changes in our society.

So the effort is to be fought on both flanks: (1) opposing the dehumanizing of the self through the group (2) recover our experiences and belief in the worth and dignity of the person.

Archetypes who lack self-awareness

• Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” novel, main character who
  • acts without any clear decision or awareness on his part
  • as though everything happened to him
  • Never acts like himself
  • A man missing both courage and despair
  • Lacks awareness of himself
  • A “stranger” to himself
• Those who tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as themselves
• Court-jester attitude of power and value being correlated with passivity rather than action

The function of Laughter

One’s sense of humor is connected with one’s sense of selfhood. Humor normally should have the function of preserving the sense of self. It is an expression of our uniquely human capacity to experience ourselves as subjects who are not swallowed up in the objective situation.

It is the healthy way of feeling a “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective. One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as the subject and the objective world around him.

So long as one can laugh, furthermore, he is not completely under the domination of anxiety or fear–hence the accepted belief in folklore that to be able to laugh in times of danger is a sign of courage.

The humor occurs because of a new appreciation of one’s self as a subject acting in an objective world.

Humor can deepen a reader’s feeling of worth and dignity as a person, and remove blinds from his eyes as he confronts the issues facing him.

In cases of borderline psychotics, so long as the person has genuine humor–so long, that is, as he can laugh, or look at himself with the thought, as one person puts it. “What a crazy person I’ve been!”–he is preserving his identity as self.

There are a few categories of laughter and humor to consider.

Generally, having a good self of humor of one’s self is positive.

There are two types of negative laughters:

1. Quantitative laugher
   • Laughter is then an escape from anxiety and emptiness in ostrich-fashion rather than a way of gaining new and more courageous perspective in facing one’s perplexities.
   • The simple laughing mechanism has the same function as the release of tension from alcohol and sex.
   • But like sex and drinking when engaged in for escapist reasons, this kind of laughter leaves one as lonely and unrelated to himself afterwards as before.
2. Vindictive laughter
   • laugher of triumph that bears no relation to smiling
   • laughter in anger or rage
   • Goes along with seeing one’s self as triumphant over other selves, rather than being an indication of a new step in the achievement of one’s own selfhood

Both quantitative and vindictive laughter reflect the humor of people who have to a great extent lost the sense of the dignity and significance of persons.

The loss of Language for Personal Communication

In this section, May is claiming that our ability to communicate our self identity with the world is diminishing in quality.

May mentions how the loss in this effectiveness of language is a symptom of a disrupted historical period; during peak periods of society, language is transformation, creative, and inspiring (Shakespeare, King James, Socrates, the Founding Fathers, etc. ), while at other points language is weak, vague, and uncompelling.

Likewise, when a culture is in its historical phase of growing toward unity, its language reflects the unity and and power; whereas when a culture is in the process of a fourth turning, dispersal, and disintegration, the language losses its power.

While spoken and written language is a reflection of our changing times, the same can be said about art, music, or any medium through which one attempts to self-express.

Artist generally seek to speak in their paintings from some solid reality in the self experiencing the world. Modern art can be viewed as an honest portrayal of the condition of our time.

But the artists, and the rest of us too, remain spiritually isolated and at sea, and so we cover up our loneliness by chattering with other people about the things we do have language for–current affairs, politics, climate disasters, tv shows, the latest sports events. Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier.

Imagine what this implies about our society in a world where deeper sentiments can only be communicated through limited language?

“Little we see in nature that is ours”

You know it’s quite funny; it seems like many of the great thinkers and contributors of society emphasize a call back to nature. Ray Dalio, Laozi–just to name two people.

Not to mention how one of the chief characteristics of the Renaissance in Europe was an upsurging of enthusiasm for nature in all its forms (like the work of Giotto). It is this strong feeling for nature that is the hallmark strength for the great Renaissance man.

Even here, May speaks much on the relationship between ourselves and nature.

People who have lost the sense of their identity as selves also tend to lose their sense of relatedness to nature–much the same way a person may not feel inspiring by the seemingly little things like a sunset, the ocean breeze, or the chipper of birds in the morning.

May claims that our relation to nature tends to be destroyed not only by our emptiness, but also by our anxiety–anxiety compels us to withdraw from nature into the isolated realms (like withdrawing from the open field into the perceived safety of a cave).

So, when a person experiences emptiness from within, that becomes the perception or lense through which he experiences the world around him–emptied, dried-up, and dead.

To relate to nature is to understand its vastness for creative and destructive potential with pure impersonality–the strong seas can flip any boat, the hungry grizzly bear will annihilate any threat to her cubs.

It’s also internalizing that the cliff off the mountain peak would break a man–and his extinction as a person would not play a single difference towards the walls of the granite mountain side.

It becomes this profound threat of “nothingness” or “nonbeing” which one experiences when he fully confronts his relation with inorganic being.

The loss in the ability to relate to nature is a reflection of modern man’s loss in his own self.

The Loss of the sense of tragedy

The task that lays before us is quite simple: we must rediscover the sources of strength and integrity within ourselves.

Here is May’s big claim for this chapter:

We could go farther and point out that finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. This is what our society needs–not new ideas and inventions, important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

A single person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.

Part 2: Rediscovering Selfhood

Chapter 3: The Experience of Becoming a Person

Summary

One sentence summary

Self-love enables the ability to love others, and one’s liveliness increases with a heightened self-awareness, leading to becoming an integrated person through rediscovering and acknowledging emotions, desires, feelings, interests, and dreams.

One Paragraph Summary

Self-love is a prerequisite for loving others. The more consciousness of one’s self, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time–we call this quality man’s liveliness (aliveness).

To recap, the first step towards becoming an integrated person involves a rediscovery of our emotions, desires, feelings, and interests–this comes from the ability to detect their awareness. The second step involves knowing what we want, given our inner interest–that is to say, we are we make sense of these impulses that have been suppressed. Finally, the third step, is to recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves–starting from our dreams.

Consciousness of Self–The Unique Mark of Man

By around age two, the human baby becomes conscious of himself; this is the birth and beginning of his own entity.

Consciousness is a powerful responsibility and superpower that comes with a price: neuroticism, anxiety, guilt, doubt, and any negative perspective.

When a boy is born, he may feel terribly powerless in the comparison with greater and strong adults around him.

Dogs for example lack consciousness, which permits them to enjoy the present moment bliss, but at the cost of not being able to distinguish between the self and the “I”, nor with the ability to learn from the past and plan for the future.

These are the feats that make man the architect of his reality–he can use his consciousness to create the reality he desires. Man can use his consciousness to influence his own development as a person.

This is what it means to be created in the image of God; to fulfill man’s potentialities and using his consciousness to create.

The struggle towards selfhood

Most of the data for these conflicts of childhood come from adults who are struggling, in dreams, memories, or in present-day relations, to overcome what in their past lives originally blocked them in becoming fully born as persons.

Almost every adult is, in greater or lesser degree, still struggling on the long journey to achieve selfhood on the basis on the basis of the patterns which were set in his early experiences in the family.

The self is always born and grows in interpersonal relationships. Conformity is the great destroyer of selfhood.

What needs to be emphasized is not only the admitted fact that we are to some extent created by each other but also our capacity to experience, and create, ourselves–our relations to others is just as important as our relation and knowledge of ourself.

Our every thought in the process of arguing against the consciousness of self proves this very consciousness in ourselves.

Making Sense of Descartes

The consciousness of one’s identity as a self certainly is not an intellectual idea. When Descartes claimed, “I think, therefore I am”, he meant, “I exist because I am a thinking creature”.

What does this mean?

You and I never think of ourselves as an idea. We rather picture ourselves as doing something, and then we experience, in imagination, the feelings that we will have when we are in actuality doing that thing–we experience ourselves as a thinking-intuitive-feeling and acting unity.

The self is thus not merely the sum of the various “roles” one plays–it is the capacity by which one knows he plays these roles; the center from which one sees and is aware of these so-called different “sides” of himself.

The Importance of Developing the Self Identity

The experience of one’s own identity is the simplest experience in life even though, at the same time, it is the most profound.

Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities.

What makes man’s potentiality more difficult than that of the acorn becoming an oak, or the puppy becoming the dog, is that man must do so in self-consciousness–that is to say that his development is not automatic the same way an oak becomes a tree, but rather must be to some extent chosen and affirmed by himself.

Man does not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills his potentialities only as he in his own consciousness plans and chooses.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

The flowing of your blood, your heart action, your whole organism would be weaker. And in the same way if man does not fulfill his potentialities as a person, he becomes to that extent constricted and ill.

This illness is the basis for neurosis–the person’s unused potentialities, blocked by hostile conditions in the environment (past or present) and by his own internalized conflicts, turn inward and cause morbidity.

Or, in the words of William Blake,

“Energy is Eternal Delight. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.”

What can we expect when we do develop our selfhood?

To the extent that we do fulfill our potentialities as persons, we experience the profoundest joy to which human being is heir.

It’s the quiet joy when he can love, create, and plan. This joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

It’s the joy that comes as a result of realizing one’s identity as being worthy of dignity, affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.

It’s the same power shown in the life of Socrates, who was so confident in himself and his values that he could take his being condemned to death not as a defeat but as a greater fulfillment than compromising his beliefs.

And here’s the good news: this joy is is not limited to the heroic or outstanding figures, but abundant for all who choose to act, no matter how inconspicuous, which is done as an honest and responsible expression of his own powers.

Self-Contempt, a Substitute for self-worth

First objection: What if we become too prideful and narcissistic?

Thinking highly of one’s self does not come from greater consciousness of one’s self nor greater feelings of self-worth. If anything, it’s quite the opposite.

Narcissistic arrogance generally comes as external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety. The 1920s, for example, was a display of great pride that revealed itself to be a cover for widespread, suppressed anxiety.

The person with weak inner strength becomes

• an insecure bully
• the loud braggart at the party
• a flexing of the muscles
• much talk, cockiness, and flamboyancy

Likewise, the prideful emptiness can be found in the fascist state of Germany during the 1940s. Fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious, and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.

Considering the case of the self-condemner

Most people feel so empty and convinced of their lack of worth anyway that they readily agree that the one who is condemning them must be right. Why would these “loser” stoop so low? Because condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth.

People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the most ready way of drowning the bitter ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation.

It is as though the person were saying to himself, “I must be important that I am worth condemning”, or “Look how nobel I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short”

The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is do concerned with punishing him. Much self-condemnation is thus a cloak for arrogance.

Becoming self-condemning is, from Spinoza’s viewpoint, on the same level as the overly narcissistic man; what makes you feel so special that God wants to focus his punishment on you? “Who do you think you are?”

To be self-hating and self-condemning is to truly be narssasstic–they are two sides to the same coin.

The idea being that if man can condemn themselves they do not really need to feel the pain of their isolation or emptiness, and the fact that they are not loved then does not cast doubt upon their feeling of worth as a person–because they can always just say, “if it were not for such and such a sin or bad habit, I would be loved”.

Thus the self-condemning substitute for self-worth provides the individual with a method of avoiding an open and honest confronting of his problems of isolation and worthlessness, and makes for a pseudo-humility rather than the honest humility of one who seeks to face his situation realistically and constructively.

Self-contempt eventually spills out into contempt for others. Conversely, self-love is a prerequisite for loving others.

Consciousness of self is not Introversion

What about the risk of being too inward, or “overthinking”?

Let’s start with the German definition of self-consciousness, which is to be “self-confident”.

Much like driving a car, the less aware you are of how to drive a car, the more tense and and “overthinking” you become, but the opposite happens when you gain more experience and understanding of the car and the rules of the road. Likewise, consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go.

The paradox is that the more consciousness of one’s self, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time.

The Experiencing of One’s Body and Feelings

The path towards the self in a journey that begins with rediscovery–that is to imply, that with which we were previously intimate, but have forgotten.

This involves rediscovering our emotions and awareness of our bodies. The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony.

Insofar as our attitudes towards our bodies, many people treat their bodies as mechanical machines with separable components–we have “sexual needs” that are detached from the rest of our “self”, and medical pills to treat certain deficiencies of our bodies during illness.

What May proposes is a reunification of the body with the self by rediscovering an active awareness of one’s body.

It is viewing all actions of the body as expressions and actions on behalf of the self.

When you enjoy a good meal, have passionate sex, or lift heavy weights, you are acting as the whole self. In all of these things, your body is not the main actor, rather YOU are, changing our perspective form “by body feels” to “I” feel.

It’s using an active narrative, “I”, rather than a passive one, “my body”, “my heath”.

Most patients in hospitals suffer as a result of anxious tendencies–this is nature’s way of saying we’re not living towards our unique potentialities.

To develope oneself is a selfless act that improves the immunity of the entire community.

The next stage begins with knowing what one wants.

The issue with articulating what we want is that we confuse it with the conformity (or social programming) of what we should want.

It can almost be stated as a fact that emotions and desires which have been repressed later drive the person compulsively–they “leak” out in due time, and often outside of our direct control.

The above statements is best illustrated between two types of people: (1) the “gyroscope man” who puts captive his emotions in jail–only for those same emotions to become lawbreakers and reap unexpected havoc (2) the well integrated man whose feelings and wants occur in a configuration; the man who feels and is aware of his impulses, without automatically reacting to such impulses. That is not to say he is repressing such impulses by denying his desires and being dishonest about what he wants, but rather understanding that he has such a desire, and he can create a plan to become aligned with that desire.

Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. Spontaneity, in this sense, means to be able to respond directly to the total picture.

The same way a good portrait has an integrated background; so too an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the world around it. Spontaneity, this, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather, is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment.

Personal Question: does this mean spontaneity is a function of social-awareness?

To recap, the first step involves a rediscovery of our emotions, desires, feelings, and interests. The second step involves knowing what we want, given our inner interest.

The third step, now, is to recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves.

What does this mean? Simply that we must both find that which we have repressed, and then welcome it back to full integration into ourselves.

How do we find things we have suppressed? Dreams are often a good start to your search.

Losing thoughts

The more self-aware one is, the more alive he is.

To becomes ourselves saves us from two issues that plague humanity:

1. Passivism: Permitting the deterministic forces in one’s experience to take the place of self-awareness
2. Activism: The error in believing that lots of motion implies one is more alive–“being busy doing nothing”. Business is just as much of a cover for anxiety as passivity.

So if we are to not be passive, and neither active, then what should we seek? Aliveness.

Aliveness often means the capacity to not act, but to instead be creatively idle–which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. (This is actually quite similar to the idea of listening over speaking–often, we view listening as not actively contributing, but that’s far from the case).

Freud has demonstrated how the modern man is very much “pushed” by unconscious fears, desires, and tendencies of all sorts; man is much less a master in the household of his own mind than the 19th century man of “will power” fondly believed.

The overall purpose of Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness.

The goal of psychoanalysis was to make the unconscious conscious; to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship–and to use this awareness to at last regain control of the ship and consciously direct it towards his path to selfhood.

The emphasis in this chapter on the heightened awareness of one’s self share much in common with the overall purpose of Freud’s thought.

With such a relation to one’s self, work for us modern men will not have to be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of the person who has consciously affirmed his relatedness to his world and his fellow men

Chapter 4: The struggle to Be

One Sentence Summary

The path to self is not only about learning to feel, experience, and desire, but to fight against what prevents us from loving outwardly and creating independently while actively (rather than passively) struggling to achieve our dream of freedom as a person in our own right.

One Paragraph Summary

The struggle towards selfhood and freedom is primarily an internal conflict where we choose to remove the dependencies that tie us down at the cost of our individual freedom. On one hand, the temptation to be “sheltered”, to regress, to be “passive” and “blunted”, are symbolized by the natural tendency to go back to the womb and “waste inward” our self potentialities; on the other hand, maturity and freedom as an individual are the opposite tendencies, and these lead to the psychological integration of “falling in love outward” or the great empathy of loving thy neighbor as thyself. If mankind is to advance, persons must be free from the chains of dependencies that come at the cost of our individual freedom. This active internal struggle towards selfhood can lead to the discovery of a higher consciousness from which we see truth, we love others without demand for ourselves, and create in ecstasy that occurs when were are totally observed in what we are doing.

Cutting the Psychological Umbilical Cord

By no means is the path to self easy.

The path to self is not only about learning to feel, experience, and desire, but to fight against what prevents us from feeling and wanting. It’s for this reason why achieving consciousness of self requires struggle and conflict. We fight against the chains and ties which bind us to the expectations of society.

Thus every person’s life could be portrayed by a graph of differentiation based on the following criteria:

1. How far he freed himself from automatic dependencies
2. become an individual
3. able to then relate to his fellows on the new level of self-chosen love, responsibility, and creative work?

So what are the psychological struggles involved in this differentiation of the person from the mass?

It is true that having close ties to family can provide a rope that brings us back down to reality–but this also means that our development is blocked by this same rope; We can go no further than the length of this rope, and the surrendered freedom for growth turns inward and festers in resentment and anger.

This same protection can have consequences on how we develop of independent adults. Real love is expansive and never excludes loving others: it is only being tied to the mother which is exclusive and blocks one’s loving one’s wife.

Case Study: The Boy without a Strong Father

I made a specific section just for the case study that May introduces, that speaks quite a bit on my situation as well (but not fully, because some of these qualities do not apply to me, but are interesting to observe).

• Gifted man in his 30s
• Only child
• Developed a contempt for his “weak” father
• When he visits home, he is paralyzed with anxiety
• Overly protective alpha mom who praised achievement and appearances
• Mother would brazenly have extramarital affairs
• Achievements by child were a way of enhancing mother’s own prestige in the community

This phrase caught my attention: “For one way to defend yourself against someone’s exploiting your success is to accomplish nothing which the other could take away–’uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’”

So what was wrong with the guy?

1. The guy suffered from a lack of feeling, confusion of sexual roles, and a lack of potency
2. The relatively atypical family pattern (from the typical patriarchal families that Freud had in his mind)
3. The mother’s excessive “coddling”; the young man derived no real sense of security and power from his position on the throne, for he was there not because of his own strength but as a puppet of the mother
4. The son has no figure of masculine strength to identify with, so he lacks that normal source of the experience of power for a growing boy.
   • As a substitute for his lack of power he has only his mother’s pampering and domineering attention
   • Consequently, this created a man who developed frequent dreams of being literally a prince; his narcissism was very great, for it has to compensate for his actual, inner feeling that he was almost completely powerless
   • similar to the theme of this book: a feeling of powerlessness is a hallmark of the hollow man

It is not a surprise then how so much inner conflict prevents such a gifted man from moving ahead in work, love, or any intimacy with persons.

So what are the solutions?

1. Temporarily, the child can withdraw, seeking to protect himself from exploitation by making himself as little as possible to avoid the “slings and arrows” of outrageous fortune
   • This is kinda what I did
2. Gradually, he can try to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and struggle actively to achieve his dream of freedom as a person in his own right
   • This is currently what I’m doing
   • This is the approach we explain in the following section

The Struggle against the Mother (or, more precisely, restrictive entities)

Orestes is one of the well known dramas that depict this struggle for freedom.

Analyzing historical literature like Oedipus or the Book of Job the profoundest truths of human experience can be seen clearly in the classical forms which have endured age after age.

The story of Orestes goes as such (paragraphing of course).

• A king father goes to battle against Troy
• Mother has an extramarital affair
• When father returns, mother kills the father, and exiles the infant son away from the palace
• When the son (Orestes) comes of age, he returns to his birthright kingdom to kill his mother
• The mother tries every trick to preclude Orestes from killing her
• Eventually, the mother seduces Orestes with false protestations of love
  • This does the trick, and Orestes becomes “passive” and “blunted”
  • THIS is the issue that every psychotherapist faces. Many young men act out the loss of potency in their struggle with a dominating mother
• upon killing his mother, Orestes undergoes a mental breakdown he called the “Furies”. This is a Greek mythological representation of self-reproach and a bad conscious–the kind of gnawing guilt which will not let a person sleep
• Orestes is then tried in court, with a major theme for precedent law: to decide whether a person is to be judged guilty for killing a dominating and exploitative parent.
• the court vote ends in a tie, from which Athena, the goddess of wisdom, makes the final decision
• The final court verdict: if mankind is to advance, persons must be free from the chains to such hating parents, even though it involves killing the parent
• Orestes is then forgiven

The overall theme of the story is struggle: a son’s struggle for his own existence as a person. The classic struggle, by shakespeare’s words, of “to be or to not be” a psychological and spiritual being. A struggle against dominating and authoritative tendencies that preclude the potentialities of the child.

What does “Killing” of the parent mean?

In one sentence: it is the metaphorical struggle against authoritative powers that would otherwise preclude one’s growth and freedom.

To be clear, we don’t mean the literal sense of “killing” your parents. Rather, we must kill-off the infantile ties of dependency which binds the person to the parents, and thereby keeps him from loving outwardly and creating independently.

This authoritative figure, from my understanding, does not limit itself to actual parents, rather any entity that locks you down.

In the story of Oedipus, the same theme presents itself, but just with an authoritative father figure rather than an overbearing mother figure. The specifics of who’s the repressive authoritive figure changes with cultural and historical factors.

In the story of Orestes, the son is chained to the mother in respect that he learns to get his rewards only by pleasing her; as though the son’s potency is accessible to him only for the purpose of living up to the high expectations of his mother. It’s important to note that

Potency is not power at all when it is available only at someone else’s command.

If Orestes lacks potency, then he lacks power; power that he could have used for the development of himself as a person or in loving other people until he becomes free from his ties to her.

In Avatar the Last Airbender, it’s Zuko’s struggle against his fire lord father.

By that same token, these “authoritative entities” are not “bad” in the sense of their own existence. Cultures, established organizations, universities, family structures, etc. all exist as a necessary response to a prior generation.

The demanding mother may have suffered great disappointment; no mother really endeavors to be exploited and demanding unless there is a good reason for it. Generally, the reason is that she has been greatly hurt herself.. The only way to protect herself, in her eyes, is to dominate others by having everything under control.

It’s a tricky balance. Because

• On one end, you don’t want to become a rigid “gyroscope man” who fallows the lead of this generation without questions and understanding why the principles are in place–otherwise they suffer in adapting to the inevitable changes in society values
• On the other end, you also don’t want to be an irrational and uncontrolled seeker of chaos who chooses to demolish all structures of seemingly authoritative figures because then we lose the practical benefit that make society go around.

Understanding the duality between womb nurturing and mature freedom

May brings up an interesting point between the mother and child which makes the child’s becoming free from the mother so crucial and difficult.

Back to the Orestes story, the final decision was made by a goddess (female) who “never knew the mother’s womb that bore me” (meaning, Athena was the birth child of Zeus, and was never nurtured or brought into this world the same way a typical human is).

From a wisdom perspective, Athena knew that the mother relationship will always tend to be conserving rather than revolutionary–an orientation towards the past (tradition) rather than the future (new age of change).

By this, Athena recognized that the temptation to be “sheltered”, to regress, to be “passive” and “blunted”, are symbolized by the natural tendency to go back to the womb, and that maturity and freedom as an individual are the opposite tendencies.

This could allude to the wisdom aspect of Athena never knowing the womb.

Orestes: How did a young man achieve freedom to live as a person?

Upon killing his mother, and being offered the title of king by his sister, Orestes realizes that he has outgrown his home city. When his sister insist that his proclivity to leave is due to his lack of a committed marriage, Orestes replies, “it is [mother] in you”–indicating that the same nature of conserving from his mother exists in his sister.

Orestes’ final decision comes as a personal commitment to himself to “not waste inward”. In overcoming his mother’s chains, he has come to establish his self of self, and has then resolved to maintaining this identity at the expense of his familiarity with his home city.

If he should accede to his sister’s pleading and remain in the city, Orestes would be like a “walking stone”–he would have forfeited his unique nature as a human being and would have become inorganic.

“I have fallen in love outward”–the final phrase of Orestes as he leaves the city, representing the goal of man’s psychological integration

What does Orestes mean by loving outward? The issue Orestes overcame was that of psychological incest–of being turned inward on the family and consequently unable to “love outwardly”.

Even Jesus preached the idea that spiritual development is away from incest and toward the capacity to love the neighbor and stranger.

When we speak of the negatives of psychological incest, it functions much the same way as biological incest. Incest does not physically harm the baby: it merely doubles the same heredity in the child, and robs it of the possibilities it would have if the parent had married outside the family.

The prohibition against incest makes for greater differentiation in human development, and requires that integration be found not through sameness, but on a higher level.

The continuum of differentiation which is the life pilgrimage of the human being requires developing away from incest and toward the capacity to “love outwardly”.

The Struggle against One’s Own Dependency

It’s important to note that while the Orestes drama takes course over the span of a few weeks, reality is much slower.

In real life, the struggle towards independent freedom is of long, uphill growth to new levels of integration–growth meaning not automatic process but re-education, finding new insights, making self-conscious decisions, and throughout being willing to face occasional or frequent bitter struggles.

A person in psychotherapy often must work through his patterns for months to realize the underlying issues that prevent him from loving, working, and marrying. Often, these patterns go undetected by the person because of how normal they feel.

The person may have to make the drastic move from abundant and familiar social and emotional support to temporary and unfamiliar isolation.

What keeps a person tied to the parent?

It’s a two factor issues that’s both external and internal. External being the actual environment, culture, and society expectations from which the child is raised. Internal in that the child internalizes these rules of the environment and battles between conforming with what everyone else is doing or having the creative courage to live life on his terms.

The good news is of course that the person has, within himself, the potency and power to get over these issues. They simply need to be rediscovered and nourished to full growth.

The struggle to become a person takes place within the person himself.

What does May mean by this? While we may be quick to point out that the external authoritative force is to blame, the reality is that, once the person is aware of his own journey towards selfhood, the crucial psychological battle we must wage is that against our own dependent needs and our anxiety and guilt feelings which will arise as we move toward freedom.

To recap, the conflict is between two parts of a person: (1) the selfhood that seeks growth, expansion, and health against the (2) the immature self which longs to remain psychologically tied to the motherly umbilical cord and receiving the pseudo-protection and pampering of the parent in exchange for independence.

Stages in Consciousness of Self

Here are the stages of becoming a person:

1. Innocence: before consciousness of the self is born (usually before age 2)
2. Rebellion: person is trying to be free to establish some inner strength in his own right (begins at around age 2)
3. Ordinary Consciousness of self: A person begins, to some extend, to see his error, use his feelings of anxiety and guilt to learn, and make his own decisions with some responsibility
4. Creative consciousness of self: A rare but rewarding level that few people achieve. A person gets sudden insights into a problem from almost nowhere; the answer emerges from what we call subconscious levels in the personality, which is always present in all creative work.
   • Alternative names for this level include “self-transcending consciousness”, “self-surpassing consciousness”, “objective self-consciousness”, or even “ecstasy” (meaning “to stand outside of one’s self”)
   • This is the level which gives meaning to our actions and experiences on the lesser levels
   • Even in short spurts of insight, this has the same effect as reaching the peak of a mountain, sketching a mental map, and then going forward with direction and purpose for several weeks of patient plodding up and down “lesser hills” when effort is dull and “inspiration” is conspicuous by its absence
   • The point at which we see truth, we love others without demand for ourselves, and create in ecstasy that occurs when were are totally observed in what we are doing
   • As mentioned in the Bible, these insights are the ones we’re willing to risk life our life for
   • Cannot occur on demand–rather spontaneously in moments of receptivity and relaxation rather than action.

Chapter 4: Reading Comprehension questions from ChatGPT

Questions

1. According to Rollo May, what is the central conflict in human existence?
2. How does May define the term “ontological guilt”?
3. What does May mean by the “freedom to be” and why is it important?
4. What role does anxiety play in the struggle to be, according to May?

Answers

1. The central conflict is the inner struggle for selfhood.
2. According to May, ontological guilt emerges from our recognition that we have the freedom and responsibility to create our own lives and define our own values. This awareness can generate feelings of unease and guilt because it confronts us with the weight of our choices and the potential consequences they carry. In essence, ontological guilt highlights the existential dilemma of being aware of our individual freedom to shape our lives and the accompanying anxiety that arises from the realization that we are solely responsible for our own existence and the direction it takes.
3. “Freedom to be” refers to the capacity and opportunity for individuals to live authentically, to express their unique potential, and to pursue their own personal growth and self-realization. May emphasizes that the freedom to be is crucial because it enables individuals to break free from societal constraints, cultural expectations, and external pressures that may inhibit their authentic self-expression. It involves transcending conformity and finding the courage to follow one’s own path, values, and aspirations. Furthermore, May argues that the freedom to be is not only important for the individual but also has a broader societal impact. By embracing and exercising our freedom to be, we contribute to a more vibrant and diverse society, fostering understanding, empathy, and collaboration among individuals.
4. Anxiety arises when we confront the challenges and uncertainties inherent in the process of becoming ourselves. It is a natural response to the awareness of our freedom and responsibility to make choices and create meaning in our lives. Instead of trying to eliminate anxiety, May encourages individuals to engage with it and use it as a catalyst for personal growth and self-discovery.

Part 3: The Goals of Integration

Chapter 5: Freedom and Inner Strength

Summary

One Sentence Summary

Freedom is the opportunity to realize even greater human values through man’s capacity to direct his own development by adopting greater responsibility in proportion to his greater self-awareness.

One Paragraph Summary

This chapter speaks on two topics: (1) the consequential emotions we experience after being denied freedom (that is, how to be aware of why we feel hatred and resentment)(2) And then an analysis on what Freedom really is.

To surrender our freedom is to surrender to hatred, anger, and resentment because it simply is not possible for a human being to give up his inner freedom when his outer freedom is denied without something coming in to restore the inner balance. Hating or resenting is often the person’s only way to keep from committing psychological or spiritual suicide; it has the function of preserving some dignity, some feeling of their own identity. The mark of maturity is to first identify what or whom you hate and then constructively use these negative emotions to re-establish one’s genuine freedom.

Freedom is the opportunity to realize even greater human values through man’s capacity to direct his own development by adopting greater responsibility in proportion to his greater self-awareness. The basic step in achieving inward freedom is “choosing one’s self”–meaning to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence. When one consciously chooses to live, two things happen: (1) He accepts responsibility for his own life as something he has chosen for himself (2) he sees discipline as necessary for the sake of values he wishes to realize.

The Man who was put in a cage

Let’s first start by asking the question: what happens to a man when his freedom was stripped away? We answer this with a thought experiment.

Imagine being in a “cage”, but having all your needs met. You get plenty of food, a nice bed, nice furniture, and you never have to work. Basically the golden handcuffs.

At first, in May’s king-servant analogy, the servant bay refuse at first, but then comfort overtakes him, and, when visited by students, the servant tries hard to convince others that he choose to live in the cage because of the value of security and being taken care of.

“But when the king was not in the yard and the man was not aware that the psychologist was present, his expression was quite different–sullen and morose”

Holy shit, this phrase from the thought experiment reminded me of (we’ll call him) Doug from work–playing the company culture card, but being extremely depressed deep down. Everyone in that office felt stuck.

What’s more interesting is the change in the servant’s conversations. At the start, the servant was ready for deep and philosophical discussions about the value in “being taken care of” or “security”–to know, he simply calls refers to his situation as “it is fate” or “it simply is”.

Wow.

Over time, the servant became to lose his sense of feeling; his eyes were distant and vague, and his smile was empty and meaningless.

“And now the man, in his desultory conversations, never used the word, “I” any more. He had accepted the cage. He had no anger, no hate, no rationalizations. But he was now insane.”

The psychologist who observed the servant had felt within himself a great emptiness; he couldn’t help feeling something had been lost, and there was left only a void.

Hatred and Resentment as the Price of Denied Freedom

The thought experiment is an illustration of how essential a value of freedom is to people. We do not need to penetrate far under the surface to discover that something else has come in to fill the vacuum–hatred and resentment of those who have forced the person to relinquish his freedom.

As is often the case, these feeling of hatred and resentment are not permitted to be expressed, but rather suppressed–only to leak out in unhealthy and unintended ways. Drugs, alcohol, porn, and all the other vices are simply manifestations of this suppressed resentment.

It simply is not possible for a human being to give up his freedom without something coming in to restore the inner balance–something arising from inner freedom when his outer freedom is denied. This “something” is the suppressed hatred toward his conqueror.

What is the meaning of this suppressed hatred and resentment?

Hating or resenting is often the person’s only way to keep from committing psychological or spiritual suicide.

It has the function of preserving some dignity, some feeling of their own identity. As though the person were to be saying silently to their conquerors, “you have conquered me, but I reserve the right to hate you”. For it is this contempt for the conquerors that gives the person an identity in his own right even though outward conditions deny him the essential rights of human being.

The person’s capacity for to eventually hate or feel angry is also a marker of his inner potentialities for standing against the oppressor.

To surrender our freedom is to surrender to hatred, anger, and resentment

How totalitarian governments succeed with hate

Recognizing that the price of enslaving people is their development of hatred, many of the successful authoritarian regimes have funneled that hatred into a useful outlet.

Nazi Germany is an example of this strategy. The Nazi’s provided for their people some object for the hatred which is generated by the government’s having taken away their freedom. In this case, the Jews became the scapegoats.

We also note in the novel 1984, how the government sets out to take away people’s freedom, it must siphon off their hatred and direct it toward outside groups–otherwise the people may revolt, go into collective psychosis, or become psychologically “dead” and inert (passive), which would be no good as a fighting force.

The McCarthyism trend is another example of siphoning people’s hatred against an “out group”.

The fact that the human being will destroy something (in the long run, themselves) rather than surrender their freedom demonstrates how important freedom is to the self.

Unpacking Hate and Resentment

May makes it clear that our awareness of this tendency for people to hate should not mean that the goal of development is that everyone start hating their parents or those in authority.

Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions, and the mark of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions.

How do we make this conversion, and what do constructive emotions look like?

Hatred and resentment should be used as motivators (or in my words, catalyst) to re-establish one’s genuine freedom. This is what the constructive conversion looks like.

The first step in the conversion process is knowing what or whom you hate (REMEMBER: A PROBLEM WRITTEN DOWN IS HALF-SOLVED).

Hatred and resentment temporarily preserve the person’s inner freedom, but sooner or later he must use the hatred to establish his freedom and dignity in reality, otherwise his hatred will destroy himself.

“To hate in order to win the new”

Anger can in fact be a useful emotion, if channeled correctly towards re-establishing the self.

Society and negative emotions

Anger and aggression, much like the hidden sexual impulses from Freud’s analysis, are looked-down upon in modern society. Negative emotions of any kind do not fit the ideal picture of the benign, self-controlled, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeois citizen.

Consequently, hatred and resentment are generally suppressed.

It is a well-known psychological tendency that when we repress one attitude or emotion, we often counterbalance it by acting or assuming an attitude on the surface which is just the opposite; we lie to ourselves by claiming that we actually “like” this person, while acting excessively polite.

But in reality, one does not get rid of hatred and resentment by clinging closely to their enemy, rather one generally displaces the emotions on other people, or turns them inward in self-hate.

Side note: I’ve personally seem this happen before. Seeing my supervisor become stress, how emotional she became, and how she either turned that aggression towards other people trying to help, or towards herself in self-disgust.

It is thus crucial to confront our hate openly.

What Freedom is Not

Freedom is not rebellion, but it is a normal interim move toward freedom.

To rebel against the standard institutions, laws, and societal expectations is to put at jeopardy your own security, sense of freedom, and strength that come from that establishment.

Rebellion is a false sense of freedom that comes from developing an inner strength that relies on knowing what moral convictions the rebel does not live up to.

The rebel gets his sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards and norms, rather than developing his own standards.

In reality, rebellion acts act as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through one’s own autonomy, new beliefs, or new foundations from which one can build a meaningful existence

Take for instance the rebels of the Gatsby 1920s era, where people were rebelling against sexual taboos and war or companionate marriage. Today (in the 1950s), these same rebels that were so trendy would have very little supporters, let alone much of an audience. As if this act of rebelling is boring and no longer appealing. Why? Because when there are no set standards to rebel against, one gets no power from rebelling.

In the 1920s Gatsby era, the once adrenalin rushing phenomenon of kissing a girl lost it’s luster and potency once it became “routine” and gave no one a special feeling of power.

Side note: is the above phenomenon known as the hedonic treadmill?

Freedom is never the opposite of responsibility

Likewise, freedom is not planlessness (or, to be without a plan in life).

Given the interdependent value of our current times (an economy that emphasizes cooperation) freedom can be found in the context of economic community and social value of work, not in everyone’s setting up his own factory or university. But this economic interdependence need not destroy freedom if we keep our perspective.

We are more free intellectually and spiritually precisely because we accept our position in economic interdependence with our fellow men.

To cling to tradition, with the defensive plea that if we lose something that worked well in the past we will have lost all, neither shows the spirit of freedom nor makes for the future growth of freedom.

At this point, May reiterates how much is a book on psychology rather than economics or sociology, but he makes the point that much of man’s psychological health is conditioned by the society in which he engages in.

We simply propose that our social world and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize himself, to develop and use his potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from his fellow men.

The good society is thus the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people–freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but positively as the opportunity to realize even greater human values.

It follows then, that collectivism, fascism, and communism is the denial of these values and must be opposed at all costs.

What Freedom is

Freedom is man’s capacity to a hand in his own development

Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self; without self-awareness, we are pushed along by primal instinct.

Consciousness of self gives us the power to stand outside the rigid chain of stimulus, and respond, to pause, and by this pause to throw some weight on either side, to cast some direction about what the response should be.

In the same way anxiety and loneliness go together, so too does freedom and self-consciousness. The less self-aware one is, the less free he is.

Man’s emerging self-awareness goes hand in hand with his enlarging power to direct his own life. As a person gains more consciousness of self, his range of choice and his freedom proportionally increase.

Freedom is also cumulative. One choice made with an element of freedom makes greater possible for the next choice. Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of one’s self.

This does not deny the existence of deterministic forces in our lives, but no matter how much one argues for the deterministic viewpoint, he still must grant that there is a margin in which the alive human being can be aware of what is determining him.

Freedom is thus shown in how we relate to these deterministic realities of life.

The pattern and style in which you build your house are products of how you, with an element of freedom, use the reality of the given materials.

So in the argument of “freedom versus determinism”, freedom is not some isolated concept, but exists in the realities of life–such as the laws of physics, the passage of time, the inevitable death of living things, or the constant change of things.

“When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order” –Meister Eckhart

Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by blind necessity but by choice.

This also means that the acceptance of limitations need not at all be a reason to give up, but can and should be a constructive act of freedom.

Two groups of people may be sick, or have short height, or have two left feet. One group will always give up and dwell in self-pitty. The other group will recognize the event as something that happens for them rather than to them, and actively struggle to enlarge their self-knowledge and freedom.

Consciousness can be seen to many as a curse that comes with anxiety. But this is simply the cost of an overall net positive super power, because it is through our self-consciousness that man can transcend the immediate events which determine him.

How man relates to merciless, deterministic realities such as death can be more important for him than the fact of death itself.

Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying “yes” or “no” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, in Nietzsche’s words, “to become what we truly are”

Freedom and structure

Freedom never occurs in a vacuum; it is never anarchy

We should avoid conformity, but without losing important relationships with other people because not only do people help orient us in reality, but much of our psychological freedom is developed from these continual interactions.

Freedom does not mean trying to live in isolation. But it does mean that when one is able to confront his isolation, he is able consciously to choose to act, with some responsibility, in the structure of his relations with the world of other persons around him.

The essence of existentialism is its belief in the capacity of the individual to care greatly about his freedom and inner integrity, enough to die or commit suicide for them if need be.

“Choosing one’s self”

Freedom does not come automatically from birth, it is achieved through struggle

The basic step in achieving inward freedom is “choosing one’s self”–this means to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence.

It is the OPPOSITE attitude of routine existence; it’s instead an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness.

It means that one recognizes that he exists in his particular spot in the universe and he accepts responsibility for his existence.

This is what Nietzsche meant by the “will to live”. It’s avoid living life on instinct mode for self-preservation (passive living), but the will to accept the fate that one is one’s self, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make his basic choices himself.

Suicide may not (thankfully) be all that common, but what is more common is the psychological suicide, where one does not take his own life, but dies because he has chosen not to live–sometimes consciously, but often subconsciously.

These ways by which people choose not to live reveal just how crucial it is to choose to live.

We being to live by first affirming and choosing own own existence. It is doubtful to say we are truly living until we have confronted the terrifying fact that it is ourselves who decides suicide by choosing not to live it.

Since one is free to die, he is also free to live.

But to choose NOT to die illustrates that every act thereafter has to some extent been made possible because of that choice. Every act thereafter has a special element of freedom.

We may often toy with the idea of suicide to realize how much more of life there is to live than the goal we are chasing.

(after explaining an example of a boy who failed to get his fame) And it suddenly dawns on him that, if he came back after the suicide, there would be a lot left in life even if one were not famous. He then chooses to go on living, as it were, without the demand for fame. It was as though the part of him which could not live without fame does commit suicide. And in killing the demand for fame, he may also realize as a byproduct that the things which yield lasting joy and inner security have very little to do with the external and fickle standards of public opinion anyway. As a result the partial suicide, the boy may now clarify his own goals and arrive at more of a feeling for the joy which comes from fulfilling his own potentialities

The purpose of the above illustration with the boy seeking and failing to attain fame is to make clear that there is a positive aspect to partial suicides, and that the dying of one attitude or desire may result in the birth of something better. This of course depends on the individual’s own attitude towards struggle–whether it’s something that makes him give up and retreat, or stand and deliver.

A “dying” part of one’s self is often followed by a heightened awareness of life, a heightened sense of possibility.

When one consciously chooses to live, two things happen:

1. His responsibility for himself takes on a new meaning.
   • He accepts responsibility for his own life not as something with which he was forcibly burden with (“I didn’t choose to be born”); but as something he has chosen for himself
   • For this reason, himself now exists as a result of a decision he himself has made
2. Discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline
   • He has chosen with greater freedom what he wants to do with his own life, and sees discipline as necessary for the sake of values he wishes to realize.

Chapter 6: The Creative Conscious

Summary

One Sentence Summary

The chapter explores two main themes: (1) the struggle of developing creative consciousness and how individuals can integrate wisdom from the past without hindering their own self-development, emphasizing the importance of courageously embracing personal growth while acknowledging the fear and anxiety that come with it (2) the significance of achieving freedom and self-identity to effectively engage with traditions and develop one’s conscience for deeper insight and ethical sensitivity.

One Paragraph Summary

Here are the two major themes covered in this chapter: (1) The struggle involved in developing creative consciousness (2) how man can relate to wisdom of the past without hindering his self development.

We may learn quite a bit from the classical stories of the past and the price of man’s creative conscious; Prometheus’ perpetual torture represents the inner conflict of the man who dares to bring mankind new forms of life through his creative act of being. More importantly, the anxiety of Adam and Eve of consciously knowing good from evil and the torture of Prometheus tell us that psychologically, within the creative person himself, there is fear in moving ahead beyond safety.

In the pursuit of this creative act of being, we’re actively struggling against the two sides of ourselves: (1) A courageous side that goes against the odds to defend freedom and personal growth; a side that is confident in meaning and value in life and courageous to accept the loneliness that comes with walking our own path (2) A servile side which passively submits to comfort and security at the price of freedom and personal-growth, avoiding having to face his loneliness and anxiety.

For any man to affirm and believe in any value, he needs the power to do the valuing from his own judgement; he admits and is aware of the fact that his motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as he learns in the future. this admission of one’s ignorance is the beginning of wisdom through which he can creatively use his powers to transcend his limitations only as he humbly and honestly as he admits these limitations to begin with.

To the extent that an adult individual has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, he has a base from which to acquire the wisdom in the past traditions of his society and to make it his. The greater a person’s awareness is of himself, the more he can acquire the wisdom of his fathers to make it his. But if this freedom is missing, traditions are blocked rather than enriched, and they may become an internalized set of traffic rules with little or no practical influence on one’s inward development. One of the distinguishing marks of strength as a self is the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self; he develops his conscience to tap deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity, and awareness in which tradition and immediate experience are interrelated.

Intro

Similar to what Naval Ravikant speaks about, part of what makes man wise and conscious is his ability to recognize the long-term consequences of his present day actions. This consciousness is what separates man from other animals.

The mark of a mature man is that his living is integrated around self-chosen goals: he knows what he wants, no longer simply as the child wants candy but as the grown person plans and works toward a creative love relationship or toward business achievement or what not.

He loves the members of his family not because he has been thrown together with them by accident, but because he finds them loveable and chooses to love them. He works not merely from automatic routine, but because he consciously believes in the value of what he is doing.

Man’s anxiety occur mainly because his values are confused and contradictory, and he has no psychic core–or at least an underdeveloped self of self.

An individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much he himself believes in the values he lives by.

The focus of this chapter to is inquire how a person can maturely and creatively choose and affirm such values.

It should be pointed out that our values depend very much on the age we live in.

No wonder, then, why in the age of transitions or fourth turnings, skepticism and doubt accompany every thought.

Recall from chapter 2, where we note the signs of a transition period of chaos in society.

And without a doubt, everyone should agree that in times of social upheaval people suffer from feelings of “rootlessness” and cling to authority and established institutions as a source of security in the storm. But this security can easily be misguided if it falls in the hands of authoritarian regimes.

“Most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once” is such a true statement for many people who may often choose suicide to handel the overwhelming complexity of life.

And naturally, because we are but animal, we seek groups and collectivism as a response to the uncertainty, because we point to other people to give us direction and stability. But this is the trap of collectivist regimes such as communism or fascism.

To fall back on old traditions and the past is no solution either, for one can never apply some “center” from the outside.

Difficult as the task may be, we must accept ourselves and our society where we are, and find our ethical center through a deeper understanding of ourselves as well as through a courageous confronting of our historical situation.

Another response comes from the more intellectually and sensitive group of people, who have turned with new interest to the ethical and religious wisdom of the past, and to the extent that this is not merely a response to anxiety, this is indeed a salutary response. The only drawback to this response is the potential for an intellectual to use it as justification for an authoritarian regime.

So we see clearly from both group’s response that the real issue is to distinguish what is healthy in ethics and religion, and yields a security which increases personal worth, responsibility, and freedom.

Adam and Prometheus

We start by asking how a healthy ethical awareness is born and develops in human beings.

Like freedom and other aspects of man’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at the price of inner conflict and anxiety.

Like the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, ethical insight and self-awareness are born at the same time; the first evidence of their knowing good and evil was in their experiencing of anxiety and guilt upon eating the apple.

God punished Adam with a lifetime of work and the realization that his life is finite.

“By the sweat of your brow shall you earn your living. Until you return to the ground. For dust you are, and dust you must return.”

The Garden of Eden represents the state reserved for infants, animals, and angels, in which ethical conflict and responsibility do not exist. Adam and Eve’s birth of consciousness indicated that they were no longer suited for the garden.

So if the story of Adam and Eve is a story that illustrates the birth on man’s consciousness, then the story of Prometheus is a story that illustrates the birth of man’s creativity.

• Adam and Eve: Consciousness: Knowing good from evil
• Prometheus: Creativity: Bringing of new ways of life to mankind

Prometheus’ perpetual torture represents the inner conflict which comes with creativity; it symbolizes the anxiety and guilt to which the man who dares to bring mankind new forms of life is subject.

So that begs the question: What does it mean that the gods fight against man’s creativity?

The Greeks and Hebrews knew that when man tried to leap over his human limitations, when man:

• leaps over his human limitations through the sin of overreaching himself
• commits hubris
• seeks universal power
• becomes arrogant with perceiving final truth

…then he becomes dangerous.

This seems to fall in line with what Socrates says:

The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and man can creatively use his powers to transcend his limitations only as he humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with

BUT The acts of rebellion from both Adam’s story and Prometheus’ story are not done in vanity nor arrogance–they were indeed humble and honest attempts for man’s seeking of greater value.

Which brings us back to the main question: What does it mean that the gods fight against man’s creativity?

Perhaps these stories reveal the age-old conflict between a new life and creativity attempting to overtake the existing entrenched authority? Those who represent the “new” find themselves in deadly conflict with the entrenched powers.

The anxiety of Adam and the torture of Prometheus tell us that psychologically, within the creative person himself, there is fear in moving ahead.

These myths speak on both sides of man:

1. A courageous side that goes against the odds to defend freedom and personal growth
2. A servile side which passively submits to comfort and security at the price of freedom and personal-growth

We now start seeing, that despite the struggle, hardship, anxiety, and guilt that comes with our consciousness, these are vastly minor prices to pay for the creative act of being.

To be sure, a thriving society should have both sides: the influence which brings new ideas and ethical insights into birth, and the institutions which conserve the values of the past. No society would survive long without both new vitality and old stability.

So, as May writes this book in the 1950s, he’s noticing that the balance has tipped far too off center towards conformity.

But what really is ethical about obedience.

Obedience only works with dogs, who lack the neurotic tendency to “break out” with an act of rebellion as a result of their repressed and denied freedom.

Side note: this is exactly what happened to me. My self-imposed imprisonment led me to eventually break out and be free as an act of rebellion.

Jesus and Socrates were executed as “threats” to moral and social stability.

Is there not the conflict between every human being’s need to struggle toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity, freedom, and responsibility, and his tendency to remain a child and cling to the protection of parents?

Religion: Source of Strength or Weakness?

In any discussion on whether religion helps or hinders inner development, the question is more about what kind of religion and how it’s used.

Philosophy may be a flight from reality into a harmonious “system” as a protection from anxiety and disharmonies of day-to-day life.

Or, philosophy may be a courageous endeavour to better understand reality.

Likewise, science may be used as a rigid, dogmatic faith by which one escapes emotional insecurity and doubt, or it may be open-minded search for new truth.

So, as with any domain (religion, science, philosophy, etc.), when we approach the question as: does it increase or decrease dependency? Does it keep the individual infantile or mature?

First question

Does a given individual’s religion serve to break his will, keep him at an infantile level of development, and enable him to avoid the anxiety of freedom and personal responsibility?

Or does it serve him as a basis of meaning which affirms his dignity and worth, which gives him a basis for courageous acceptance of his limitations and normal anxiety, but which aids him to develop his powers, responsibility and his capacity to love his fellow men?

The problem of being prey to someone else’s power is reinforced by the individual’s own infantile desires to be taken care of. These tendencies within one’s self is the proclivity of that individual to give one’s self over to the dominating person.

This statement hits so hard for me. I cannot rely on a mentor who will show me the way. It’s nice to have them, but at the end of the day, it’s up to me to fix my inner vacancies and find power from within.

Generally, there are two attitudes towards those who adopt religion:

1. A “zest” in wanting to do something with themselves and their lives
   • A function of the person’s confidence in meaning and value in life
   • A constructive contribution of a mature religion with an energizing influence
2. A divine right to be taken care of
   • One of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity
   • Have been taught that happiness and success would follow their “being good” and “well liked”
   • Being merely obedient like a dog undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength
   • Over time, this person will begin losing his real powers of ethical, responsible choice, which also means their power to achieve goodness and joy are diminished
   • has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money; he is shy for asking what he wants and believes the “church” (his employer, government, or whatever) will “take care” of him financially
   • It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be taken care of, as though he were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of?”
   • eventually developing other sentiments of having a right to exercise power over others (“Am I not my brother’s keeper?”)
   • Gets his feelings of worth, prestige, and power through identifying with someone who is above in the hierarchy
   • As though everyone were trying to live vicariously through someone else, until no one knows where he himself is
   • “If you take responsibility for me, I will for you”

NOTE: NONE of these tendencies are restricted to religion; they can apply to any big institution. This is called psychological transference.

The neurotic uses of religion have one thing in common: they are devices by which the individual avoids having to face his loneliness and anxiety.

Maturity and eventual overcoming of loneliness are possible only as one courageously accepts his aloneness to begin with.

Freud was able to work with such courage and unswerving purpose for the last 40 years of his life; he won the battle of being able to grow and work alone in that first solitary 10 years.

This is the battle the creative ethical figures like Jesus win in the wilderness; that the real meaning of the temptations with which Jesus wrestled was not in the desire for bread nor power, but in the temptation to throw himself down from the mountain and prove that God was protecting him–Jesus resolved that the power that created the universe was within himself, and the rest of his creativity was up to him. Jesus learned to speak at ONE authority.

I think Spinoza said it best when he said,

“Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by Him in return”

The brave man knows that the love of God is its own reward because beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, not because they will rebound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them.

NOTE: This does NOT imply some sort of martyr-like attitude for seeking truth, rather a love of something for its own sake.

Anxiety should be treated as a marker for what you KNOW you get to fulfill. Ask yourself, “what anxiety makes me now wish to run to the wings of an authority, and what problem of my own am I trying to evade?”

Religious faith is not “bad” or “good” any more so than science or philosophy. The question is rather how much the belief or practice is, for a given individual (rather than community), an escape from his freedom? Or, how much of it is a way of strengthening him in existence of his own responsibility and ethical power.

The Creative use of the past

To the extent that an adult individual has achieved some freedom and identity as a self, he has a base from which to acquire the wisdom in the past traditions of his society and to make it his. But if this freedom is missing, traditions are blocked rather than enriched. They may become an internalized set of traffic rules, but they still have little or no practical influence on one’s inward development.

The above statement makes practical sense–we don’t really know why things are the why they are until we fully experience life. We may wonder why families are the way they are, or why certain institutions exist. The reality is, we won’t really know until we have practical experience of life ourselves.

The greater a person’s awareness is of himself, the more he can acquire the wisdom of his fathers to make it his.

One of the distinguishing marks of strength as a self is the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self.

The impact of wonder

When one is able to relate creatively to the wisdom of his fathers in the ethical and religious tradition he finds that he discovers anew his capacity for wonder.

Those who take a rigid view either of religious or scientific truth become more dogmatic and lose the capacity for wonder.

But wonder adds to the zest of the one who has found freedom, and zest to their conviction of meaning in life.

One’s religious attitude is to be found at the point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

Wonder is the opposite of cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, and responsive. It is an “openness” attitude–an awareness that there is more to life than one has yet fathomed.

Wonder and humility go together.

It is important to emphasize that the connotation with wonder and humility are not that of a person being passive; this is a common misconception. In reality, creative experience (like wonder, love, etc) is a greatly heightened consciousness and very intense activity on our own part. Even responsiveness implies aliveness.

The misconception may come from people who view love as something they “fall into”–the reality is, the true blessing is in the active struggle, work, and creation of that love.

What is our conscience?

The general tendency is to think of conscience as that which tells the individual what not to do, as though it were acting against what one supposedly “wants” to do.

But May claims that conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, rather conscience is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity, and awareness in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated.

The Person’s power to do the valuing

As I read the introduction of this chapter, it seems even my own interpretation of May’s work is not fully correct.

There are two common viewpoints May encounters:

1. What is necessary is to simply work out a new set of values
2. “There’s nothing wrong with the values of the past”

But both of these approaches miss the central problem: That modern man has to a great extent lost the power to affirm and believe in any value

May argues that what the individual needs is a prior capacity, or the power to do the valuing from his own judgement.

When man seeks to “find” a center of value, he does with with the same attitude of shopping for a coat–he sees what’s “in style” these days and looks at what the group expects of him. This is partly to contribute to the emptiness in our society.

The values one truly attains cannot be intellectually debated, because the person’s experience in life has allowed him to accept them as realities.

A shift from “I love my children because of the theoretical ideal of raising a generation” versus “I love my children because I actually experience it”.

A response that leads to a person to ultimately say, in a debate, “if you haven’t experienced it yourself, I can’t explain it to you”

In actual life, the real value is something we experience as connected with the reality of our activity–any verbal or written discussion is on a quite secondary level.

To be sure, no act of integrity is perfect; one will always have to struggle, doubt, and conflict. It means only that one has endeavored to act as nearly as possible form the “center” of himself, that he admits and is aware of the fact that his motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as he learns in the future.

In this emphasis on inner motives in ethical acts, the findings of modern psychotherapy and the ethical teachings of Jesus have their clearest parallel. For the external point in Jesus’ ethics was his shifting the emphasis from the external rules of the 10 commandments to inward motives.

What does this practically mean? That the ethical issues of life are not simply “thou shalt not kill” but rather are inward attitudes toward other persons–anger, resentment, exploitative “lust of the heart”, “railings”, “jealousies”, so on and so fourth.

Naturally, myself included, some persons will be frightened by the freedom in such an ethics of inwardness, and made anxious by the responsibility which this places on each man’s decision. They may react by yearning for the “rules”, the absolutes, the “ridged ancient laws”, which relieves us of “this fearful burden of free choice”.

The truth in the “inner light” tradition in religious history is that one must always begin with himself. In the Socratic view, each individual is his own center, and the entire world centers in him, because his self-knowledge is a knowledge of God.

Chapter 7: Courage, the virtue of Maturity

Summary

One Sentence Summary

The opposite of courage is conformity

One Paragraph Summary

This chapter introduces the concepts of love and truth, and the prerequisite courage that underpins the pursuit of both.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom borne from the actualization of one’s own nature. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependance to new levels of freedom and integration; the power to let go of the familiar and the secure. Courage is found in the small, iterative, hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. The hardest step in developing courage is accepting full responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though his wisdom is both limited and imperfect; for it is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and he may very well be wrong!

The capacity to love presupposes both self-awareness and freedom; self-awareness in the ability to appreciate and affirm the potentialities of this fellow man, and freedom in that the choice to love is freely given. For the same reason self-awareness takes great work, conflict, and struggle, so too can we say the same about love. The extent of our love is in proportion to our capacity for independence; it is only after a person has achieved the prior capacity to stand alone as a person in his own right that permits him to freely to fully integrate himself with another. Like the creative conscience, this giving of one’s self and finding one’s self within the person is the highest level of fulfillment of one’s self.

The reason we do not see truth is because we do not have enough courage. To find the truth, and consequently the answers to one’s questions, one must have the courage to venture into the unknown and risk discovering what one hates to see. He must have courage to interrogate himself and his beliefs without mercy. Truth is often missed not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again some preconceived opinion that looks or sounds familiar. Seeing truth is a function not of the separate intellect, but of the whole man: one experiences truth in moving ahead as a thinking-feeling-acting unity.

The courage to be one self

This chapter is devoted to the virtue of courage!

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependance to new levels of freedom and integration.

Courage, in the final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shock of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature.

The opposite of courage is conformity

People lack courage because of their fear of being alone, isolated, or being subject to “social isolation” as an outcast.

Their fear is valid, because for much of early society, many people withered away and died as a result of being treated as though they did not exist.

Thus, when we emphasize standing on one’s own belief, we do not at all imply living in a vacuum of isolation; actually, courage is the basis of any creative relationship.

Think back to the gifted man who has trouble with his career, relationships, and fulfillment (See Chapter 4, section “Cutting the Psychological Umbilical Cord”):

• fear of women by way of their mother
• fear of the woman’s dominance
• fear of becoming dependent on her

But when the neurotic anxiety is overcome, courage then must go along with the capacity to relate, and this courage is shown in the capacity for intimacy.

It takes courage not only to assert one’s self but to give one’s self.

Courage is the prerequisite for the creative being.

One of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the ties to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born.

Being engaged in creative work (art, business, research, etc) AND creating one’s self (becoming freer through the voluntary adoption of more responsibility) are two aspects of the same process.

That’s related to how Naval mentions how “business” is not a skill that can be taught–the pursuit of business success is really an extension of one’s own being.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we’ve learned from Adam and Eve and Prometheus, will involve considerable inner conflict.

May paints a beautiful picture of a person who finally develops courage. He takes the courage to leave his family and go out and pursue his purpose, only to then be confronted with deep anxiety and loneliness, and the threat of suicide. His dreams would have the common theme, “If you create, you will leave the familiar, and you will be lonely and die; better to stay with the familiar and not create”. This of course is the common inner struggle one develops as he pursues his creative calling.

Side note: This is exactly what happened to me. When I developed the courage to move across the country, I left behind much of what was familiar with me. At first it was fun, but when stress came, I caved in and flew right back home.

Courage is not to be confused with spectacular acts like a soldier’s charge.

Course IS the power to let go of the familiar and the secure.

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Thus, courage is not limited to heros. Brazen rashness is different from courage; rashness comes from compensating inner anxiety by courting external dangers. Courage must be judged as an inner state, otherwise external actions can be very misleading.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand definitely for outer freedom; it is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage.

The greatest block to a person’s development of courage is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Vanity and narcissism are the enemies of courage.

Courage arises from one’s sense of dignity and self-esteem; one is uncourageous if he thinks poorly of himself.

When one acts to gain someone else’s praise, the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness.

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions for no other motive other than simply because these are what one truly believes. Courage is therefore an affirmative choice of “this is my self, my being” rather than a choice of “I can do no other” (if one cannot do any other, that is he is limited in his options of actions, then what courage is involved?)

It also takes courage to achieve a new level of growth while withstanding the counterattack of anxious reaction within himself as well as the attacks of friends and family members who would be more comfortable if he had remained the way he was (remember what Jesus said in Matthew 10:36, “And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”)

When in a person’s development courage begins to emerge, he begins to break out of the pattern of seeking other people’s approval.

We see thing when we first make the mistake of asking our parents for permission to be free; what this does is imply his lack of freedom, and his guilt if he asserts his freedom.

The hardest step in developing courage is accepting full responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though his wisdom is both limited and imperfect.

This is what Paul Tillich means when he said, “courage to accept one’s finiteness”; it is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and he may very well be wrong!

It is only from this courageous acceptance of finitude that one develops the powers to fully integrate himself:

• self-discipline
• power to do the valuing
• the creative conscience
• the creative wisdom of the past

All of these are the treasure behind the dragon; to confront the dragon is to be courageous.

A Preface to Love

The most constructive place to begin learning to love is to see how we fail to love. Indeed, modern society is in dire need of love, BUT it is NOT helpful to tell people to “just love” because we as individuals are not even doing that good of a job of displaying love; to ask people to love when you yourself are not loving is to appear as a sham and hypocrisy, which is far worse than hostility because at least being hostile is honest.

If we wish to contribute greatly to this world, we ought to work on ourselves to be better exemplars of loving people.

Those who call for love loudest often express it the least

While I’ve personally defined love on a personal level–that is one who is personally aligned with his mission, May provides us with a definition for external love:

Love is delight in the presence of the other people and an affirming of his value and development as much as one’s own.

May claims that there are two elements to love:

1. The worth and good of the other person
2. one’s own joy and happiness in relation with him

The capacity to love presupposes self-awareness, because love requires the ability to have empathy with the other people, to appreciate and affirm his potentialities.

Love also presupposes freedom; certainly love which is not freely given is not love.

Likewise, if one “loves” because one cannot do without the other, love is not given by choice; for one could not choose not to love. (This is the same argument behind Rabbi Manis Friedman).

So in a society where everyone is dependent on the other, and each person is also highly anxious, lonely, and empty, it goes without saying that love is merely a veneer for something much deeper.

A common example of this discrepancy is when two people, feeling the burden of solitary and emptiness within themselves, relate to each other in a kind of unspoken bargain to keep each other from suffering loneliness. When “love” in engaged in for the purpose of vanquishing loneliness, it accomplishes its purpose but at the price of increased emptiness for both parties.

Side Note: to what extent am I doing this with my current mentor?

Love is generally confused with dependance; you can only love in proportion to your capacity for independence

A parent should, likewise, learn when to allow the child space to develop his independence; a parent cannot expect the child to love them as “repayment” for taking care of them or “sacrificing” for them.

We receive love in proportion to our own capacity to love; our capacity to love is in proportion to our capacity to be persons in our own right–our capacity for freedom.

To love means to give, and this giving requires a maturity of self-feeling. Similar to what Spinoza said, truly loving God does not involve a demand for love in return the same way we may demand for love from our children.

Another misconception people have about love is that it’s self-sacrificing. We do not “give up” something in order to love; one gives only if he has something to give–a basis of strength within himself from which to give. Otherwise, what exactly is he giving?

Yet another misconception is the idea that we “lose ourselves” in love–far from it! Like the creative conscience, it is the highest level of fulfillment of one’s self. It is a giving of one’s self and finding one’s self at once! Such ecstasy represents the fullest of interdependence in human relations.

This same paradox appears in the creative consciousness; one can merge one’s self in ecstasy so long as he has gained the prior capacity to stand alone; to be a person in his own right.

So here is May’s call to action for this section: Learning to love will proceed more soundly if we cease trying to persuade ourselves that love is easy, and if we are realistic enough to both call our emotions by their right names and abandon the illusory masquerades for love in a society which is always talking about love but has little of it.

Courage to see truth

Nietzsche one proclaimed “error is cowardice”, meaning that the reason we do not see truth is because we do not have enough courage.

To find the truth, and consequently the answers to your questions, one must have the courage to venture–whether one arrives at the best answer depends very intimately on the degree of one’s maturity and courage.

The finding of truth hinges greatly on the investigator’s inner qualities of probity and courage.

Truth is often missed not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again some preconceived opinion–something that looks or sounds familiar–or at least not to wound some favorite idea. With this intention, truth is often missed.

It is the courage to make a clean slate in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. The philosopher must have courage to interrogate himself without mercy.

So, we see clearly from Nietzsche’s idea that finding truth is less of an intellectual endeavor and more of a a capacity for one’s self-awareness.

To seek truth is to risk discovering what one hates to see

Seeking truth requires a kind and forgiving relationship to one’s self.

To see truth depends on man’s ability to be conscious of himself. By this same consciousness he can also search within himself and find the wisdom which speaks to every man who ears to hear.

People who struggle to find truth is not because they are too “self-aware” or inner focused, but rather their neurotic needs, repressions, and conflicts distort what they see. It’s these symptoms of a weak inner identity that lead many to “transfer” some prejudice of our own to other people and the world around us.

The more a person lacks self-awareness, the more he is prey to anxiety and irrational anger and resentment; anger and anxiety are the small blockers that prevent us from seeing truth.

Self-awareness is not a product of intellect

High intellect may help, but it can also block us from self-awareness when we misuse it to intellectualize and avoid solving the hard problems in reality.

Seeing truth is a function not of the separate intellect, but of the whole man: one experiences truth in moving ahead as a thinking-feeling-acting unity.

Chapter 8: Man, the Transcender of Time

Summary

One Sentence Summary

Start right now.

One Paragraph Summary

To love reality is to be present in the current moment. The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty, and responsibility. The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The wise man will not wait around for future rewards and punishments. Go forth this moment, in honesty, integrity, courage, and love.

Man does not live by the clock alone

Here we try to answer the fundamental questions concerning TIME

• “Is all this worth the effort and struggle”.
• “Is it too late to start?”
• “Why bother now?”

Time permits man the capacity to conduct his life in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom.

Man does not live by time alone, rather by the significance of events. For example, people can spend two hours in mindless commuting, or eight hours in a boring job, but 10 minutes talking to their crush–despite the first two events taking quantitatively more time, the quality of the 10 minutes is how he defines the outcome of his day–the 10 minutes with the girl takes up more “room-space” than 20 hours in the rest of the day.

Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time, but the meaning of the experience in relation to the person’s hopes, anxiety, and growth.

The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. However, if he is a conformist, unfree, and undifferentiated, then he works not by his choice but out of compulsion. The more conformist and unfree he is, the more time is the master; the more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.

“A man who lives intensely really lives, but a man who lives to be 120 doesn’t necessarily live at all.”

The passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being; such fear is generally a symbol for the fact that their consciousness of time always confronts them with questions of whether they are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off ultimate decay and extinction.

“A peron is afraid of growing old to the extent that he is not really living now.” - Carl Jung.

Hence, it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about growing old is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive.

But even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening “void”. This is shown everyday in the fear of boredom.

“Man is the only animal who can be bored” -Erich Fromm

Man suffers unnecessarily when he desensitizes himself with addictions and gives up his consciousness just so that he does not have to experience boredom. A “good time” is thus defined as escaping boredom.

One of the neurotic, unconstructive ways of using one’s capacity to be aware of time is to postpone living.

This happens all too much when we say “Things will be better when —”:

• “I’m married”
• “I get a new job”
• “I move around”

Essentially, these people (myself included), react to the feelings of emptiness and purposelessness by turning their minds to the future and asking, “What pleasant thing do I have to look forward to?”–they hope that their future fantasy and daydreams will deaden the present.

That’s not to say that hope is a negative attitude either–hope can be an energizing attitude that brings joy from some future event into the present so that by anticipation we are more alive and more able to act in the present.

Thinking of the past can have the same escape function as thinking of the future.

The Pregnant Woman

The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. Psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.

The past and the future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking about it at the present moment. The same can be said about the future.

To live in the “when” of the future or the “then” of the past always involves an artificiality–a detachment from reality because reality can only exist in this present moment.

To fall in love with reality is to love being this present moment

To confront the reality of the present moment often produces anxiety with a vague experience of being “naked”–being face-to-face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch from which one cannot retreat nor hide.

The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility.

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to courageously and constructively confront the present.

“In the light of eternity”

May brings a nice example of an author who finally publishes his groundbreaking book when confronted with the fear of dying the next day. The book was a success because it was nto catering to any audience, but rather an extension of his own creative conscious.

The wise man will not wait around for future rewards and punishments.

Living in the present moment does not mean mere intensity of living, nor does it mean living by an absolute dogma. Rather, it means making one’s decisions in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one’s own unique character as a person.

No Matter what the age

The question of which age we live in is irrelevant. If anything, this moment right now is literally the best time in history.

The real question we seek is how the individual, in his own awareness of himself and the period he lives in, is able through his decisions to attain inner freedom and to live according to his own inner integrity.

No matter how “well integrated” a society may be at any given time, the task of achieving self-consciousness and the capacity for making one’s own choices responsibly will always belong to the individual. Likewise, no traumatic world event can rob the individual of the privilege of making the final decision with regard to himself.

On the more profound level, each individual must come to his own consciousness of himself, and he does this on a level which transcends the particular age he lives in.

The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is 20 or 80, rather it is whether he fulfills his own capacity of self-consciousness choice at his particular level of development.

The person who can die courageously at 30-who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that he can face courageously the necessity of giving up his life-is more mature than the person who on his deathbed at 80 cringes and begs still to be shield from reality.

The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty, and responsibility.

Is one has courage to do so, he is then in a position to fulfill as much as he can in the present moment through his own nature.

“Does not the uncertainly of our time teach us the most important lesson of all: that the ultimate criteria are the honesty, integrity, courage, and love of a given moment of relatedness?

If we do not have that, we are not building for the future anyway. If we do have it, we can trust the future to itself.

• Freedom
• Responsibility
• Courage
• Love
• Inner Integrity

These are never perfectly realized by anyone, but are ideal goals for which we strive to attain each moment.