A Quote by Louise J. Kaplan
During adolescence imagination is boundless. The urge toward self-perfection is at its peak. And with all their self- absorption and personalized dreams of glory, youth are in pursuit of something larger than personal passions, some values or ideals to which they might attach their imaginations.
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By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moralexistence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.
When the healthy pursuit of self-interest and self-realizatio n turns into self-absorption , other people can lose their intrinsic value in our eyes and become mere means to the fulfillment of our needs and desires.
Salvakalpa samadhi is absorption in eternity to the point where there is no real concept of self but there's still a karmic chain. Nirvikalpa samadhi is absorption in nirvana; concepts of self and no-self go away completely.
What is the purpose for which Masonry exists? Its ultimate purpose is the perfection of humanity. Mankind it self is still in a period of youth. We are only now beginning to acquire a consciousness of the social aim of civilization, which is man's perfection. Such perfection can never end with physical perfection, which is only the means to the end or spiritual perfection.
The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antidote to this self-focus.
To deny one's self, to take up the cross, denotes something immeasurably grander than self-imposed penance or rigid conformity to a Divine statute. It is the surrender of self to an ennobling work, an absolute subordination of personal advantages and of personal pleasures for the sake of truth and the welfare of others, and a willing acceptance of every disability which their interests may entail.
Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent.
Never underestimate the power of self-absorption, including your parents' self-absorption.
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good.
What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.
Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.
Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what.
If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.
I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection. But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in this endless twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.
