Sam Keen: Trending quotes

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Sam Keen: 112 quotes0 likes

“What we should desire creeps silently inside us and replaces what we really desire. … We take jobs, make compromises, and settle down for the long wait, for the arrival of the future that will bring the reward of happiness we so justly deserve for our sacrifice of the pleasures of the moment. The process is so slow we scarcely notice the substitution of plastic for flesh. We forget how the body sang when it ran free; how it rejoiced in stretching, rolling, skipping, dancing, walking, eating, loving, bounding, leaping, resting.
Gradually the body beings to change to protect itself against the intrusion of joy or sorrow. It armors itself against the threat of playfulness and spontaneity. … The working body is complete when it is thus armed against those emotions that would threaten the primacy of the work ethic and the pattern of delayed gratification upon which it rests.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 102-103

“Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget. They tempt us to disown the common capacity of the human spirit to transcend normality.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 134

“It is the vocation of each person to become unique.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 134

“A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 136

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 140

“The man who comes home exhausted because he has been taught to believe without question that his male identity is based on nine-to-five loyalty and the giving of his best energies to the corporation has made a decision about his sexuality. He sacrifices his corpus to the corporation. His chosen method of expending energy and structuring time disallows afternoon dalliance with his wife or lover.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 101

“Self-awareness and self-consciousness are entirely different. When I am “self-conscious,” it is really someone else’s eyes that are watching, judging, and criticizing me. … It is these eyes that must be put out if I am to make sense of and remain in touch with my true self. And when we fail to find symbolic ways of destroying the watchers by becoming our own true witness, then the parents or authorities are sometimes literally killed.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 136

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

“One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere.”

Sam Keen

The Passionate Life (1983)

“The female has learned by long experience to win by losing, to wield power in the passive-aggressive manner of the sadomasochist.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 115

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

“Living mythical-political systems are invisible to those who live within them. The problem of myth and consciousness is reflected in the old saying: We don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish. Myth is the sea of commonly accepted assumptions that are not questioned by the majority of those living within a system. To the average, normal member of society, the myth is what is natural and obvious.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 99

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 145

“[Some of the] rules and articles of faith [of the western myth]:
Questions that cannot be answered should not be asked.
Knowledge and power are the twin pillars of human identity.
Knowledge consists of organized facts.
Sensation, intuition, and feeling are primitive, immature forms of thought.
Wealth is created by fabricating natural, raw materials into finished products; the production of goods is the basis of value.
Economics has replaced religion as the ultimate concern.
The chief motivation (eros) of human beings is to accumulate and consume.
Advertising and propaganda are the chief erotic sciences of the modern age.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 23-24

“The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of arrogance. … To become an outlaw, I must decide that my personal experience rather than the mores of the tribe is the authority upon which I will base my judgments. In a bold act of self-love and self-trust, the outlaw proclaims that individual to be higher than the universal.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 130

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 21

“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.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 139

“Meditation, like masturbation, has until recently been considered a form of self-abuse.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 162

“The “bleeding hearts” who want love without anger, relationship without conflict, harmony without contradictions, are forced to create an illusory world of unambivalent love. … It is not accidental that such perfect persons (who never question their own motives, or suspect their hidden ideology or self-interest) make other feel tainted and guilty. Every sentimental sermon is served with a side-dish of guilt. In their presence, honest doubt is named cynicism, anger is called evil, and ambivalence is castigated as craziness.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 84

“The moment I step out of my adult identity, it becomes obvious that my tribe is not significantly different from other tribes in its habitual projection of blame for conflict onto an enemy. It is disturbing for an individual to reject the tribe’s claim to self-righteousness because it excludes him or her from the civil religion, the social immortality system, and the ritual of scapegoating, in which guilt is alleviated by being assigned to an outcast or enemy that the tribe may destroy in the name of God.”

Sam Keen

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 148-149