ix. The person who is oriented toward having always makes use of crutches rather than his or her own two feet. That person uses an external object in order to exist, in order to be oneself as he or she wishes. He or she is himself or herself only insofar as that person has something. That individual determines being as a subject according to the having of an object. he or she is possessed by objects, and thus by the object of having them.
x. Love, reason, and productive activity = psychic forces
Ch 1. On the Art of Being
2. Question of the aim and meaning of life leads us to the problem of the nature of human needs.
4. Overcoming of greed, illusions, and hate, and the attainment of love and compassion, are the conditions for attaining optimal being.
6. Inner liberation= freedom from the shackles of greed and illusions.
7. That man can be a slave without chains is of crucial importance in our situation today. The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion-apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free. He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whose existence he is unaware?
9. Masters of Living- e.g. Meister Eckhart
Ch 2. Great Shams
20. Simple one= He does not deceive but he is also not deceived.
Ch 3. Trivial Talk
22. Modern man is alienated from others and confronted with a dilemma: He is afraid of close contact with another and equally afraid to be alone and have no contact. It is the function of trivial conversation to answer the question 'How do I remain alone without being lonely?'
24. One should see the insincerity behind the mask of friendliness, the destructiveness behind the mask of eternal complaints about unhappiness, the narcissism behind the charm. One should also not act as if he or she were taken in by the other's deceptive appearance- in order to avoid being forced into a certain dishonesty oneself.
If other people do not understand our behavior- so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to 'explain,' which usually implies that the explanation be 'understood,' i.e., approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself- to his reason and his conscience- and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.
Ch 4. "No Effort, No Pain"
26. Solidarity among men has one of its strongest foundations in the experience of sharing one's own suffering with the suffering of all.
Ch 5. "Anti-authoritarianism"
27. Liberty- The need to be oneself and not a means to be used for the purposes of others.
28. It tried to establish freedom of whim instead of the freedom of will.
This "Why not?" implies that one does something simply because there is no reason against doing it, not because there is a reason for it. It implies that it is a whim but not a manifestation of the will. Following a whim is, in fact, the result of deep inner passivity blended with a wish to avoid boredom. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.
29. The greater the sense of powerlessness and the greater the lack of authentic will, the more grows either submission or an obsessional desire for satisfaction of one's whims and the insistence on arbitrariness.
Ch 6. "To Will One Thing"
31. To will one thing presupposes having made a decision, having committed oneself to one goal. It means that the whole person is geared and devoted to the one thing he has decided on, that all his energies flow in the direction of this chosen goal.
Where energies are split in different directions, an aim is not only strive n for with diminished energy, but the split of energies has the effect of weakening them in both directions by the constant conflicts that are engendered.
Ch 8. To be Aware
39. If I am aware of feeling joy, love, sadness, fear, or hate, this means that I feel and that the feeling is not repressed; it does not mean I think or reflect about my feeling.
41. The strength of man's position in the world depends on the degree of adequacy of his perception of reality. The less adequate it is, the more disoriented and hence insecure he is and hence in need of idols to lean on and thus find security.
43. If avoidance of pain and maximal comfort are supreme values, then indeed illusions are preferable to the truth. If, on the other hand, we consider that every man, at any time in history, is born with the potential of being a full man and that, furthermore, with his death the one chance given to him is over, then indeed much can be said for the personal fulfillment. In addition, the more seeing individuals will become, the more likely that they can produce changes- social and individual ones- at the earliest possible moment, rather than, as is often the case, waiting until the chances for change have disappeared because their mind, their courage, their will have become atrophied.
Ch 9. To Concentrate
45. Concentration is such a rare phenomenon because one's will is not directed to one thing; nothing is worth the effort to concentrate on it, because no goal is pursued passionately. But there is more to it; People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in a n event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self. For the person with a dominant having orientation this fear of losing oneself is one of the main factors that operates against concentration. Finally, to concentrate requires inner activity, not busy-ness, and this activity is rare today when busy-ness is the key to success.
Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.
Ch 11. Psychoanalysis and Self-Awareness
57. He questioned all conscious thought, intentions, and virtues and demonstrated how often they are nothing but forms of resistance to hide the inner reality.
64. The trans-therapuetic goal is that of man's self-liberation by optimal self-awareness; of the attaining of well-being, independence; of the capacity to love; and of critical, dis-illusioned thinking, of being rather than having.
65. A person who seeks optimal growth may also have neurotic symptoms and thus need analysis as a therapy. A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet 'for sale,' who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence- briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing- cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his 'normal' contemporaries.
Ch 13. Methods of Self-Analysis
70. One may try to remember the thoughts that were intruding while one tried to be still, and then 'feel one's way into them' with the aim of seeing whether they have any connection, and what it might be. Or one may proceed by observing certain symptoms such as feeling tired, or depressed, or angry, and then 'feel around' what it was a reaction to and what was the unconscious experience behind the manifest feeling.
72. Still another approach is an autobiographical one. By this I mean speculations about one's history, beginning with one's early childhood and ending with one's projected future development. Try to get a picture of significant events, of your early fears, hopes, disappointments, events that decreased your trust and faith in people, and in yourself.
Ask: On whom am I dependent? What are my main fears? Who was I meant to be at birth? What were my goals and how did they change? What were the forks of the road where I took the wrong direction and went the wrong way? What efforts did I make to correct the error and return to the right way? Who am I now, and who would I be if I had always made the right decisions and avoided crucial errors? Whom Did I want to be long ago, now, and in the future? What is my image of myself? What is the image I wish others to have of me? Where are the discrepancies between the two images, both between themselves and with what I sense is my real self? Who will I be if I continue to live as I am living now? What are the conditions responsible for the development as it happened? What are the alternatives for further development open to me now? What must I do to realize the possibility I choose?
73. The degree of discrepancy between the conscious and unconscious plots varies enormously in many people. On the one end of the continuum are those persons for whom there is no secret plot because the person has grown so far that he has become entirely one with himself, and need not repress anything. On the other extreme there may be no secret plot because the person has identified with his /evil/ self to a degree that he does not even try to pretend that there is a 'better self'.
77. What can I know of myself as long as I do not know that the self I do know is largely a synthetic product; that most people lie without knowing it, that 'defense' means 'war' and 'duty' submission; that 'virtue' means 'obedience' and 'sin' disobedience; that the idea that parents instinctively love their children is a myth; that fame is only rarely based on admirable human qualities, and even not too often on real achievements; that history is a distorted record because it is written by the victors; that over-modesty is not necessarily the proof of a lack of vanity; that loving is the opposite of craving and greed; that everyone tries to rationalize evil intentions and actions and to make them appear noble and beneficial ones; that the pursuit of power means the persecution of truth, justice and love; that present-day industrial society is centered around the principle of selfishness, having and consuming, and not on principles of love and respect for life, as it preaches. Unless I am able to analyze the unconscious aspects of the society in which I live, I cannot know who I am, because I don't know which part of me is not me.
79. The pains of labor are different from the pains of an illness. What matters is the entire context in which the effort is made or the pain is suffered, and which gives it its specific quality.
Ch 14. On the Culture of Having
89. The average man today thinks very little for himself. He remembers data as presented by the schools and the mass media; he knows practically nothing of what he knows by his own observing or thinking. Nor does his use of things require much thought or skill.
90. Primitive man is in an entirely different situation. He has very little education, in the modern sense of spending a certain amount of time in an educational institution. He himself is forced to observe an to learn from his observations. He observes the weather, the behavior of animals, the behavior of other human beings; his life depends on acquiring certain skills and he acquires them by his own doing and acting. His life is a constant process of learning.
93. Whatever filled their lives, it was largely a result of their own doing and their own experience.
He did not want to have or to consume more, because not the acquisition of riches but the productive use of his faculties and the enjoyment of being were his goal.
100. It is perhaps difficult for a person living in today's cybernetic society, in which everything is obsolete in a short time (and even if it is not, it will eventually be exchanged for something newer), to appreciate the personal character of the things of daily use. In using them one imparts something of his life and of his personality to them. They are not lifeless, sterile, or changeable things anymore. That this is true has been clearly demonstrated in the custom of many earlier cultures to put in a person's grave the very things of his personal and daily property. The equivalent in modern society is a person's last will and testament, which may have its consequences for years after his death. But his objects are not his personal things, but precisely the impersonal private property, he owned such as money, land, rights, and so forth.
101. A relationship is socially recognized as marriage as long as the man and the woman love each other, want each other, and want to stay together.
103. The change of function happens at the point where possession ceases to be an instrument for greater aliveness and productivity but is transformed into a means for passive-receptive consumption.
Neither is actively related to anything or anybody, neither changes and grows in the process of living; each only represents one of two different forms of non-aliveness. Showing the distinction between possession-having and use-having needs to take into account the double meaning of use: Passive use ("the consumer") and productive use (the artisan, artist, skilled worker). Functional having refers to productive use.
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