Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Separate - Connected
Centrifugal - Centripetal
Rights - Responsibilities
Personality: the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.
Personality can never develop unless the individual chooses his own way, consciously and with moral deliberation.
A man can make a moral decision to go his own way only if he holds that way to be the best. If any other way were held to be better, then he would live and develop that other personality instead of his own. The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.
The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation [the path of the inner voice] is replaced by collective necessities.
Conventions are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy.
The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable, but is no less a terrible danger for that.
[C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.195, 198, 202
'Has due recognition been given', Winnicott asks pointedly, 'to the need for everything to be discovered afresh by every individual analyst?'
It was a position reactive to a Society which had, in Winnicott's view, equated development within a tradition with an uncritical compliance to the tradition.
[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.91
[...] we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership.
There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.
[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.212
[On 'modern-minded man']
His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in points of time.
Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd.
To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to general opinion.
[Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('On Being Modern-minded'), p.78, 79
There is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.
By that I mean that I personally do not believe in the word style.
Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of beings on earth that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.
Because we have two hands and two legs. Now the unfortunate thing is that there's boxing, which uses hands, and judo which uses throwing.
I'm not putting them down, mind you - but because of styles, people are separated. They are not united together because styles become law.
The original founder of the style started out with a hypothesis. But now it has become the gospel truth, and people who go into that become the product of it.
It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are structured, how you are built, or how you are made...it doesn't seem to matter. You just go in there and become that product. And that, to me, is not right.
So styles tend to not only separate man because they have their own doctrines, and the doctrines became the gospel internal truth, that you cannot change, you know?
But if you do not have style, if you just say, "Here i am, as a human being, how can i express myself totally and completely?" - that way, you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization, as opposed to a internal process of continuing growth.
Man, he is constantly growing and when he is bound by a set pattern of ideas or way of doing things, that's when he stops growing.
[Bruce Lee]
The YELLOW MEME thinks and acts from an inner-directed core. The individual gyroscopes that enable the person to keep balance in a paradoxical world spin within the principled, knowledgable self. Such people have strong ethical anchors of their own reasoned choosing, derived from many sources but are not entrapped by rigid rules based in external dogma or mandates of authority.
[...] one develops confidence in the self-generated messages and instructions that emanate from one's core beliefs.
[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.278
So often in our lives, we act as though there were only one set of rules. For instance, in cooking we tend to follow recipes with dutiful precision. We add ingredients as though by official decree. If the recipe calls for a pinch of salt and four pinches fall in, panic strikes, as though the bowl might now explode.
Thinking of a recipe as a rule, we often do not consider how people's tastes vary, or what fun it might be to make up a new dish.
Mindfulness, p.16
When you're stuck with a set of absolutes when you're a kid - you know, you go to this kind of church, you do that kind of thing, and you think this way - if you have any sense of imagination I think that you fall out fairly quickly with absolutes; and you want to see as many avenues as are possible in life.
And I think, for my part, I got to a place where […] I could pick bits and pieces of each of those avenues. Its not essential to take one avenue as the gospel. No one man is right about anything - or even one group of people - are not right about everything.
I would pick and choose little bits of everything; a little bit of Buddhism maybe, a little bit of this, a little bit of that … to kind of give me some basis, some kind of explanatory platform for my life. And that in itself is an enjoyment.
[David Bowie]
I looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own [...]
[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.215
I could look up creativity in The Oxford English Dictionary, and I could do research on all that has been written on the subject in philosophy and psychology, and then I could serve it all up on a dish. Even this would be garnished in such a way that you would exclaim: 'How original!' Personally, I am unable to follow this plan.
I have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous.
But I think you can see in this my own need to make sure I am not buried by my theme. It would kill me to work out the concordance of creativity references.
Evidently I must always be fighting to feel creative, and this has the disadvantage that if I am describing a simple word like 'love', I must start from scratch. (Perhaps that's the right place to start from.)
[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays By A Psychoanalyst ('Living Creatively'), p.41
The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought.
The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside himself.
[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.167
Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases).
Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.
[Momus]
http://imomus.livejournal.com/468556.html
Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive.
Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades for biological survival.
Indeed, such liberation is only possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he has some discretion as to which of his parents' teachings he will accept.
At certain specific moments early in his life he decides how he is going to adapt to them. It is because his adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be undone, since decisions are reversible under favourable circumstances.
First ... the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has to be lifted ... then the influence of the individual parental, societal and cultural background has to be thrown off. The same must be done with the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally the advantages derived from one's immediate social circle have to be partly or wholly sacrificed.
In essence, this whole preparation consists of obtaining friendly divorce from one's parents (and from other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.
[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.161
[...] even the individuals whose initiation into certain secrets has marked them out in some way are fundamentally obeying the laws of group identity, though in their case the group is a socially differentiated one.
The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organisation to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognised that it is really the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet.
All collective identities, such as membership in organisations, support of "isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfilment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.375
Kohlberg (1969), in his extension of the early work of Piaget, discovered six stages of moral judgment, which he claimed formed an invariant sequence, each successive stage representing a more adequate construction of the moral problem, which in turn provides the basis for its more just resolution.
The stages divide into three levels, each of which denotes a significant expansion of the moral point of view from an egocentric through a societal to a universal ethical conception.
With this expansion in perspective comes the capacity to free moral judgment from the individual needs and social conventions with which it had earlier been confused and anchor it instead in principles of justice that are universal in application. These principles provide criteria upon which both individual and societal claims can be impartially assessed.
In Kohlberg's view, at the highest stages of development morality is freed from both psychological and historical constraints, and the individual can judge independently of his own particular needs and of the values of those around him.
When […] the sole precursor to the intimacy of adult relationships is the trust established in infancy and all intervening experience is marked only as steps toward greater independence, then separation itself becomes the model and the measure of growth.
The infusion of feeling into their judgments keeps [women] from developing a more independent and abstract ethical conception in which concern for others derives from principles of justice rather than from compassion and care.
The observation that for women, identity has as much to do with connection as with separation led Erikson into trouble largely because of his failure to integrate this insight into the mainstream of his developmental theory.
[Carol Gilligan]
'In a Different Voice', Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, p.483-4, 509
Dupré (1993) is […] correct in proposing that we think of free will as human ability to project meaningful distinctions into behavior. To act top-down from the intentional level in which meaning is embodied is thus to exercise free will […]
Because all self-organizing systems select the stimuli to which they respond, behavior constrained top-down is to that extent increasingly autonomous of forceful impacts from the environment. Self-organized systems act from their own point of view.
The more structured the entity, the more complex its organization and its behavior, and the more decoupled from and independent of its environment: the more autonomous and authentic, in short.
Dynamics in Action, p. 249
But even […] lordship of the few is far removed from the ancient freedom — witness Frederick the Great's saying: "I am the first servant of my state.
Hence the desperate efforts of the 'exceptional' man to keep himself inwardly free. Here, and only here, begins the individualism that is a reaction against the psychology of the mass. It is the last uprising of the carnivore soul against its captivity behind the bars of culture, the last attempt to shake off the spiritual and intellectual limitations that are produced by, and represented by, the fact of large numbers.
Hence arise the types of life typified by the conqueror, the adventurer, the hermit, and even certain types of criminals and bohemians. The wished-for escape from absorption by the masses takes various forms - lordship over it, flight from it, contempt for it.
The idea of personality, in its dark beginnings, is a protest against humanity in the mass, and the tension between these grows and grows to its tragic finale.
Man and Technics, p. 59
Silent Violence
Step toward madness
Don't Commit to It
Construct it Differently
Open Source Approaches
New Deeds for New People
Vessel & Cargo: 3. Fetishism and Commerce
Playing the Art Game: Art as In-between
The Oak and the Stream
Walk a Straight Line
Passed On
The Dangers of Dogmatism
Hear the Calling
Healthy Risks
Self preservation
Begin It Now
Labels: Beck, Berne, Black Elk, Bowie, Fowles, Fromm, Gilligan, Juarrero, Jung, Langer, Lee, Momus, Phillips, Russell, Spengler, Winnicott
Being Brave
Extravert / Introvert
Build it Up, or Tear it Down?
Rational / Non-rational
Masked Hero
Soul Possession
Devils in the Dark
Casting a Shadow