Wandering with the Wind...

Sunday, July 22, 2012

'...pain calls the body to the forefront of experience. It puts the person back into the center of things forcefully as a feeling animal. It is thus a natural complement to sadism. Both are techniques for experiencing forceful self-feeling, now in outer-directed action, now in passive suffering. Both give intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. Furthermore, to experience pain is to "use" it with the possibility of controlling it and triumphing over it. ... the masochist doesn't "want" pain, he wants to be able to identify its source, localize it, and so control it. Masochism is thus a way of taking the anxiety of life and death and the overwhelming terror of existence and congealing them into a small dosage. One then experiences pain from the terrifying power and yet lives through it without experiencing the ultimate threat of annihilation and death. ... the sado-masochistic combination is the perfect formula for transmuting the fear of death. ... this is a way of taking self-administered, homeopathic doses; the ego controls total pain, total defeat, and total humiliation by experiencing them in small doses as a sort of vaccination. ... we see the fascinating ingenuity of the perversions: the turning of pain, the symbol of death, into ecstasy and the experience of more-life.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - The Naturalness of Sado-Masochism (P. 247)

'...the mentally ill all have a basic problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent lives; they are hyper-fearful of life and death. From this vantage point the theory of mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmashed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled - unable to exercise the "normal cultural heroism" of other members of the society. The result is that the person cannot permit himself the routine heroic self-expansion nor the easy yielding to the superordinate cultural world-view that other members can. This is why he becomes a burden on others in some way. Mental illness, then, is also a way of talking about those people who burden others with their hyperfears of life and death, their own failed heroics.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 248)

'...the depressed person is one who has embedded himself so comfortably in the powers and protection of others that he has forfeited his own life. ... the people around the depressed person have to pay for it. Guilt, self-torture, and accusations are also ways of coercing others.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 248)

'...the problem of mental illness is one of not knowing what kind of heroics one is practising or not being able - once one does know - to broaden one's heroics from their crippling narrowness. Paradoxical as it may sound, mental illness is thus a matter of weakness and stupidity. It reflects ignorance about how one is going about satisfying his twin ontological motives. The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motives are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but of our stupidity about satisfying them."

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 251)

'...the perversions of "private religions" are not "false" in comparison to "true religions". They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible. All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with - yet must still live and struggle in.'

- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 252)

'Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.'

- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 255)

'[The knight of faith] is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant's parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch each other's lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.'

- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 258)

'...each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions.'

- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 259, James)

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~~~*Left with the Winds at 1.20am*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 1:20 AM

Roaming the Winds