Sam Keen Quotes
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We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
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A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.
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When … some intimation of the eternal significance of my time moves through the heart of my self, it must still battle a positivistic turn of mind and mean-spirited secularism that denies the existence of the holy.
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Outlaw consciousness is born the moment I drop out, stop the world, cease being an actor identified with the mythic roles I have been playing in society. Change begins when I do nothing except observe. The wisdom of the railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. Meditation is the healthy form of voyeurism.
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The neurosis of normality is a case of repetition compulsion caused by the repression of awareness.
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Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
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You can know what's in your life when you know what's in your heart.
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Kierkegaard said that the only way we can be released from the enchantment, the siren song of the myths, is to play the music through backwards. To break the spell of the ego I must recover my personal and political history, I must demythologize the private, family, and public myths that have informed me.
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To love the carnal self means to love the body-mind. I cannot abuse my body with alcohol, stress, and self-indulgence and still claim to love my self.
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Meditation, like masturbation, has until recently been considered a form of self-abuse.
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In back of the outward calm … a small terrified voice cries out: 'I need it. I have to have it or ...' The end of the sentence is lost in chaos. The need is so strong that an illusion is created that it must be fulfilled, or the very existence of the self is threatened.
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In a political situation where tyranny reigns and rebellion is not tolerated, few men and women will have the luxury of going beyond the stance of the rebel.
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The gentlest and most insidious way we are dominated by the body politic is by the official versions of the good life that are implicit in advertising and propaganda. Happiness is a new car, a color TV-fill in the gap with your own 'freely chosen' artificially stimulated desire.
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Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.
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Within the horizon of this western myth, love is understood as the artificial restraining of our natural impulses toward unbridled aggression.
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If you live out of a negative identity, … others will always be cast in the mold of the enemy against whom you must struggle.
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The outlaw is the conscious warrior who makes use of the aggression to break down the walls, barriers, and boundaries that artificially separate and alienate.
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Addiction depends upon keeping the multiplicity of our desires unconscious. When I invite all that I am into awareness, I realize that no one substance, activity, or person has the capacity to satisfy me fully. I leave aside the security of the fix and begin the adventure of falling in love with the multiplicity of the self and the world.
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One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere.
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Being impotent because they have never dared to assert themselves, they continually play the blame game. They are innocent and powerless and, therefore, others are always to blame when things go wrong. … They have yet to bite the apple of consciousness.
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A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.
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It is the vocation of each person to become unique.
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The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.
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For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role. The outlaw quietly takes a seat in the back row of the theater of the mind and watches.