Sam Keen: Trending quotes

“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”

“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

“Trust what moves you most deeply.”

“The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Overstimulation of the adrenal glands (with consequent exhaustion of the spirit) is the price of our incorporation within the male womb of the modern corporate society.”

“A major component of the western myth is the belief that myth is a primitive and mistaken way of thinking about the world that has been replaced by science. Commonly, the word “myth” is now used to mean an illusion or a lie… Enlightened moderns are accustomed to looking at the queer beliefs of the Mayas or the Tassaday and seeing them as mythical. But we look on our own belief systems as rational and rooted in the realities of politics and economics. As Joseph Campbell says: “Myth is other people’s religion.””

“Pleasers … make up what Earl Shorris has called “the oppressed middle,” the middle-managers who enjoy “the comforts of fearful people” and pay by submitting to their superiors’ definitions of happiness and success.”

“The carrot of happiness has been dangled in front of me, just beyond my reach for as long as I can remember, and I have never gained on it. It is always still just a step beyond me. And, what’s worse, I have been hypnotized by the promise so that I keep going for it, stay in the harness. The moment I turn my eyes from the carrot and ask the radical question about my true desires, I step out of the harness and begin to wander freely in search of what will satisfy my hungers.”

“A living myth remains largely unconscious for the majority. It is the reality, not the symbol. … Some people in every culture, however, see through or beyond the myth. … Those whose amphibious minds move both within and beyond the myth may be though of as outlaws or metaphysicians. Myth and metaphysics are related to each other in the same way that religion is related to theology. The mythical mind is unreflective. It lives unquestioningly within a horizon of the culture’s images, stories, rituals, and symbols, just as the religious person rests content within the liturgy and creedal structure of the church or cult. The metaphysical mind reflects upon the myth and tries to make it conscious. It plays with the stories and images and lifts the basic presuppositions about life into the light of consciousness. In this sense, metaphysics is the thinking person’s religion.”

“It is only from the perspective of the outlaw … that we are able to see that mythically informed normality is a form of mass hypnosis.”

“Where authority represses freedom, rebellion becomes the hard work of love, which is necessary because love, freedom, and spirit are inseparable.”

“The path that leads from the persona to the self, from the adult to the outlaw, consists of learning to distinguish between false desire and true desire, or superficial desire and profound desire, or obsessive desire and free passion, … or illusory needs and real needs.”

“The self-awareness that grows out of the habit of witnessing is nonjudgmental. I look at my actions, my feelings, my experience with soft and compassionate eyes, from a great distance as if I were God or a novelist. The chief rule of the witness is: Judge not. Do not identify with or against anything you observe. The witness must be amoral, a pure phenomenologist. The courtroom of civil conscience must be closed for a time. There is a time when the outlaw switches from contemplation to trans-moral action. But in order to stop the reactionary patterns of thought and behavior that make up the personality, there must be a prior time of inaction. As I gain skill as an objective and compassionate witness, my identity gradually shifts from my persona to my self. In place of the old compulsive, preprogrammed reactions, I find a growing ability to pause between the stimulus and the response. I cease being merely a biological creature who reacts automatically to steak and potatoes, the lure of immediate sex, or the invasion of my territory; I deliberate and choose what is most desirable. I am no longer captive either to my impulses or to the judgments made upon me by my society. In the newfound silence, I find the freedom to disengage from my old self-images and addictions.”

“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.”

“There are at least three fundamental ways in which the rebel impulse may become perverse: (1) [we can] get caught in a stance that always positions us against others; (2) [we can be] deficient in the power to say “no,” and hence follow the path of least resistance; and (3) [we can] seek to prolong the adolescent dream of endless possibilities, and hence live in a moratorium from commitments.”

“The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.”