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Man's Search for Meaning is a book written by Viktor E. Frank who was a psychiatrist at the University Clinic in Vienna at the time when he was brought to concentration camp, which he survived. As such he has a a lot to say about suffering, about overcoming suffering and also what comes after. He seemed to have found an answer to the question of "How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of everything?". Viktor E. Frank is founder of "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" - logotherapy. In his own words:

Despite the evil that he survived he kept optimistic and found his meaning in life without need for revenge. He returned back to Vienna after WWII.

And the Meaning of life?

Here are my notes:

• p5 On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one mau choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
• p7 We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge of the "psychopathology of the masses" (if I may quote a variation of the well-known phrase and title of a book by LeBon), for the war gave us the war of nerves and it gave us the concentration camp.
• p22 Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel any more. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more.
• p37 The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• p38 My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
• p44 To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.
• p48 No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• p66 Fundamentaly, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
• p67 If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
• p69 This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes" What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.'"
• p71 A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It becomes easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; every thing in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of the inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequences. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
• p72 Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
• p74 What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
• p76 Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how"
• p77 We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answers must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
• p91 A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.
• p98 Let me explain why I have employed the term "logotherapy" as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning". Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term "striving for superiority," is focused.
• p104 Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, of the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man need in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noödynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
• p106 The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a two fold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tell him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
• p108 The Meaning of Life? To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
• p111 Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
• p113 In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
• p122 Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect of by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
• p138 To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to "be happy". But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy". Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon - laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say "cheese,", only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.
• p139 In the first, as I was told by American soldiers, a behavior pattern crystallized to which they referred as "give-up-itis." In the concentration camps, this behavior was paralleled by those who one morning, at five, refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut, on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing - neither warnings nor threads - could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.
• p150 Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• p150 In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irrevocably lost, but rather, on contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity. From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past. ... But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy an, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
• p153 Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly yo hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. ... You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

Here are my notes from a book called Freedom to Live written by Rober S. Hartman. Hartman devoted his life to answering a simple question of - What is good? - and thinking how to organize good. In his own words:

I think it's similar question or a concern as - Why is it so easy to destroy anything and why it is so hard to create or invent new things? Or why does a little bit of goodness does nothing to evil and why does a little bit of evil destroys the whole goodness? Why does one nuclear bomb can kill thousands of people in a flash of minute and one hospital heal only couple of people in week?

So why? Isn't this just the way it works?

Hartman experienced the "atmosphere" first world wars, he saw his uncle in tears who was send to war and who knew he is going to die there.

Hartman acknowledges and reasons that many evil things back in the history were done in the name of "good". Good for us, good for them, good for the nation or good for the eternal life. The question of what good actually is, is a really tough one.

Consider the joy of the nation that thought the first world war will bring them anything good:

And the result? Was is good or bad? From a statistical point of view... :

Hartman went on with his search and even acquired law degree in hope that the law knows the answer.

This note is also a perfect reasoning why law is not enough. There has to be "something" more.

What has philosophy to say about good?

So we are stuck:

Hartman say that the most important thing everyone should do is self awareness!

Despite the fact that ourselves is the closes "person" to us, it should be the best known. But this is not the case!

The Anthony de Mellos book is all about self awareness. He also wrote that it's the most important thing. But unlike de Mello, Hartman tried to develop and reason tools and ways how to recognize good and evil.

There is interesting chapter called "George's -- and Everyone's -- Problem" which is considering everyone's problem and that is if to stay at work which forces unethical practices or which is ignoring the human being role during the working hours.

As a person who could perceive both first and second world war, Hartman was really worried about the cold ward and the danger of nuclear war. Still he was looking forward to the future and had faith that things can change.

This book is out of print now which is a really big shame. The only way how to get is a library or to buy used one.

Here are my notes from the book:

Chapter 1 - I was born to die.

• p9 This was the day when Kaiser Wilhelm and his six sons, each in a uniform of the various military formations, showed their faces and their power - the power of Germany - to the German people. Germany, whose imperial word was obeyed around the world, from Dares-salaam to Kiaochow, from Heligoland to Samoa, from Windhuk and Lome, Rabaul and Bougainville to Bikini and Eniwetok. All these, circling the globe, were German military bases. The world listened when the German Kaiser spoke. He was power, world power. Deutschland, "Deutschland über alles" was no vain boast.
• p10 The shock of seeing the death head atop the Kaiser in the Tiergarten was the first of four remembered experiences which by the time I was five years old had shaped my life. The second memory is of my father and mother dancing through the living room one August day in 1914 because my father had been accepted as a volunteer in the Kaiser's army. The glory of the Kaiser had entered our home. There were handshaking and congratulations all around. Germany, the greatest, the most cultured country in the world, had been attacked by her enemies, perfidious Albion, degenerate France, and brutal, backward Russia; and Germany responded as one man.
• p11 This spectacle of marching men, with its aesthetic commotion, the songs and flowers, the flags and music, went on day after day for four years. Though it stirred me, I saw the dark side only. I remember thinking of the final destination, the helplessness of the fallen man disappearing into the black and bottomless manhole.
• p12 My first three experiences were harbingers of the fourth. I came to think of my first three as the Face of Death, the Dance of Death, and the March of Dead. In the fourth I felt Death itself.
• p12 I remember asking, "Uncle Alex, why are you crying?" He said "I have to go to war." "Why do you have to go to war?" I asked. "The Emperor commands it." "Well," I said, "stay and don't go." And he looked at me with eyes so sad I have never forgotten them. "I can't," he said, "and I am going to die." As he said this I felt steel tongs gripping my body. A cold dread filled me. I turned and ran from the room.
• p13 Reflecting upon this chilling experience today, I still feel the monstrousness of an earthly power that can send a young man of twenty-two to die.
• p18 Every day during a certain period one of my teachers -- a gentleman of the old imperial school, obviously -- required us to stand up at the beginning of class and repeat in chorus a kind of loyalty oath: "I was born to die for Germany"
• p20 My birth, a cosmic event for the universe, an existential event for me, a blissful event for my parents, was a military event for Germany. It was manpower, a particle of the collective power of the nation. Thus, life was reduced to a matter of military supply. Love was reduced to the biological function of mating; happiness at the birth of a baby became satisfaction at the addition of war material; and death became a statistic.
• p20 The key, I decided, lay somewhere in the correct answer to the question, "Why does a killer in war get a medal and in peace the electric chair?" In my diary I wrote on May 17, 1927: I have seen something remarkable. I was just in the movie and in the news there appeared Von Hindenburg. The people applauded. It seems people must always be enthusiastic for something. We must be careful not to direct this hunger for enthusiasm towards the military. But there must be some direction.
• p21 I have seen something remarkable. I was just in the movie and the news there appeared Von Hindenburg. The people applauded. It seems people must always be enthusiastic for something. We must be careful not to direct this hunger for enthusiasm toward the military. But there must be some direction.
• p23 Examples of this fallacy are given in every logic textbook: "Men are numerous; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is numerous." "The crowd is dense; John is a member of the crowd: therefore John is dense." In these examples the reasoning is obvious fallacious. But "Germany is powerful; I am a German; therefore I am powerful" was not obviously fallacious to Germans. Because Germany was militarily powerful in 1914, every German worker or mailman thought he was powerful.
• p24 Germany lost in the First World War 1,808,545 dead, or three percent of her population. After the war the birth rate made up for this loss in 6.4 years. Thus it could be argued from a collective viewpoint, Germany lost nothing. But the individual casualty was a man, loved and loving, and his loss was irreplaceable. It was a life lost, a life wasted, dumped into a manhole. The state takes human life supposedly to protect the whole. But is a human life of less value than a collective?
• p33 I thought to myself, if evil can be organized so efficiently, why cannot good? Is there any reason for efficiency to be monopolized by the forces for evil in the world? Why is it so difficult to organize good? Why have good people in history never seemed to have had as much power as bad people? I decided I would try to find out why and devote my life to doing something about it.

Chapter 2 - What is good?

• p43 But when I got my law degree from the University of Berlin in 1932, I hadn't learned a single thing from law about good and bad. The law doesn't say. It tells only what is legal and illegal. It is an instrument that can be used for good or evil. Law like science, is morally neutral. With science you can make the Sahara bloom or you can turn the world into a desert. With law you can make evil look good by making it legal.
• p46 Science has changed the physical way we live so much that Julius Caesar or Columbus would not comprehend it. Unfortunately, it is equally certain that Jesus Christ would find mankind little changed. For the inner landscape in which he was interested and where he hoped to establish the Kingdom of God looks as barren and sterile, as chaotic and anarchic, as neglected and uncultivated as in his day.
• p48 I can't tell you what goodness is, I can only tell you what it is like. It is like the sun that radiates everything, that warms everything, that makes everything fertile and brings forth everything.
• p48 Believe it or not, you go through the whole of philosophy and nowhere do you find the solution to the problem of what is goodness in general.
• p50 Now we knew how to make a bomb that would destroy hundreds of thousands of people, but we still didn't seem to know how to make ourselves good men. We might blow up our whole world before enough of us could find out.
• p52 When a person understands that a thing "is good" he doesn't need to know anything of the thing in question, but he must know something of the concept of which the thing is an instance.
• p53 A thing is good when it has all the properties it is supposed to have, or put another way, a thing is good when it fulfills its definition. In other words, goodness is the fulfillment of anything's concept or definition.
• p58 When one reflects that more human being have been killed by other human being in this century than in all previous recorded history, it is no hard to conclude that some things have gone wrong.
• p61 The more I am aware of my Self, the more, and the more clearly, I define and fulfil my Self, the more I am a morally good person, a good 'I'. I am morally good if I am as I am. All the words of ethics mean this very same thing, this identification of myself with myself; being sincere, honest, genuine, true, having self-respect, integrity, authenticity.
• p66 This Self-awareness is different from knowing. Some people know everything but are aware of nothing, like the man in the Thurber cartoon about whom one woman whispered to another, "He doesn't know anything but facts." Others are aware of everything but know nothing. The first are informed fools, the second uninformed sages. The first are intellectuals without moral insight, the second are simple people with intuitive moral insight.
• p69 She just is. ... She is, as we call it, transparent to her self. She is free to pour all her energies into living for others. Such a person we call a saint. Maria is a small-gauge saint. A great saint would be a person who matches the depth of his own being with the width of his intellectual horizont. This was Jesus.
• p69 Smartness doesn't help. You have to be, just be; you have to be natural and not pretend, not be proud or ashamed of this or that. You have to be able to put your worldly matters in their places. To be is probably the most difficult and, at the same time, the most important task of our moral lives.
• p70 Children sense Personality; they respect a person who respects himself.
• p72 You get your power in crises. A genius is in a continual crisis. He gets his power all the time. When you read the stories of men of science, like Newton, or of art like Bach or Michelangelo, you find that when asked their secret they gave almost the same answer: Anybody can do it who doesn't do anything else day and night. ... A genius puts his whole Self into a problem. He's not necessarily a good person morally -- he's just a genius. There's a difference between a great man and a great good man.
• p74 We are all one, and when we do a wrong thing everyone has done it with us. That is why we are afraid that everyone knows. I am responsible for everybody else and everybody else is responsible for me. This is the meaning of love.
• p76 I'm result of creation, of evolution. I began in infinity, and where do I end? Do I end with my death? Well, there's my son and my granddaughter. I am a link in the chain of generations on earth. Even though I have no children, my Self, my spirit, as I said, is not in space and time. How then can it die in space and time? It cannot die. Body and mind may fall away, but the spirit must go on to eternity.
• p79 Self-aware, and who are truly themselves without knowing it. They are like people who enjoy the symphony without knowing the score. Should they learn the score, they would enjoy the music even more.
• p80 I have moral values to the degree that I fulfil my definition of my Self. To the degree that I am I, I am a morally good person. Moral goodness is the depth of man's being himself, and that is the greatest goodness in the world. For what we find within us when we penetrate to the roots of our Selves, no matter what route we take, can only be described as God.
• p80 So it is with many of us Americans. We play into the hands of the communists by putting money and other extrinsic values ahead of human value. The increase in juvenile delinquency, crime, corruption, and graft in American life is evidence of the leaks in our moral dikes. Violence is fast becoming part of the American way. Indeed, according to sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, a new kind of criminality is emerging, one who maims or kills and destroys for kicks and who has no regard for the rights and feelings of others.
• p81 "We May Be Rich But They Are Happy" was the title of an article by British economist Barbara Ward in The New Your Times Magazine (May 5, 1968) in which she pondered the question, "Will the spread of Western technology cause the people of Asia and Africa to lose their secret of self-fulfilment?" "Our technical society," she writes, "so wrapped up in means and manipulation, too often fails to give us direction and dedication, without which we can be rich and healthy and strong, yet bored and joyless as well."
• p84 God is valued systemically in theology, extrinsically in comparative religion, and intrinsically by a personal salvation. God is the supreme value, the value of values. Nothing more valuable is thinkable.
• p88 Value, we may say, is meaning. When we say that life has meaning we mean it has value. The richer its meaning, the richer its value. When we say that life has no meaning, we mean it has no value. The poorer its meaning, the poorer its value. A meaningless life is without value, is no good.
• p93 "To burn a man alive does not defend a doctrine, but slays a man... We do not testify to our own faith by burning another, but only by our readiness to be burned on behalf of our faith."
• p99 A group of factory girls were given better working conditions, and productivity increased. Then the improvements were taken away from them, but productivity still increased. The girls got mid-morning breaks and a shortened work week, and productivity increased. The breaks were eliminated and the work week lengthened, still productivity increased. No matter what was done, productivity went up. Roethlisberger and Dickson, the men conducting the research, were puzzled and wondered what kind of logic was at work here. They concluded: What is done is not so important; what is really important is the human attention given the girls and the cooperation they give in return.

Chapter 3 - George's -- and Everyone's -- Problem

• p103 We have defined goodness -- anything is good when it has all the properties it's suppose to have -- and we've build a scientific axiology around that axiom. With this science we have found that we can know and measure value in its systemic, extrinsic (social) , and intrinsic (Self or spiritual) dimensions, and we've found that a human life in its infinity is the most valuable thing there is.
• p103 Men...have for the most a very lowly conception of themselves, that is to say, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute of all that a man can be...Not only does a man prefer to dwell in the cellar; he loves that to such a degree that he becomes furious if anyone would propose to him to occupy the bel étage which stands empty at his disposition -- for in fact he is dwelling in his own house... Yet man does yearn to be better than he is, to be truly himself. The divine does persist within; but we are torn this way and that. Social and business pressures push us, and we go along, but the spark within is hard to extinguish, and even as we hurry to conform we may pause to wonder if this is all there is to life, and we glance uneasily over our shoulders (once a week or more), wondering vaguely if we haven't forgotten something, a cheerful word perhaps, a quiet moment, a little love -- could it possibly be ourselves we have forgotten?
• p105 The Harvard Business Review reports that eighty percent of the executives who would talk about it admitted that unethical practices are a generally accepted practice in their respective industries. Everyone of us, I have no doubt, knows personally of men who, under severe pressure and moral strain, have deserted their Selves and "cracked up" physically or mentally. Such value crises do not occur only in business, of course; they happen in the home, in the church, in politics, in every part of our lives.
• p106 The danger arises, I think, from the growth of organizational bigness. The life of the Organisation is apt to become more important then the life of the individual. George and Jim are likely to become loyal Organization servants first, human beings second; executives first, lovers, husbands, fathers, or real persons second. Even friendships are likely to depend entirely upon their extrinsic value to the Organization. In all this, human intrinsic values naturally would take a beating. The inner Self would be practically lost.
• p107 Nevertheless, men who know how to work with people are increasingly in demand in business. Surveys, indeed, indicate this quality is priced much more highly than technical skill in holders of upper echelon positions. Inability to cooperate with others and inability to judge people have been found to be two of the most frequent reasons for executive failure.
• p108 A nation that aspires only to material progress, says historian Arnold J. Toynbee, is doomed to economic stagnation, boredom, and moral decay. No society, he insist, has ever flourished without a spiritual meaning. The same thing could be said about a man -- after all, most mental cases result from dull, hopeless, meaningless lives -- and the same thing could be said about a business, for businessman needs spiritual meaning in what he does as much as anyone.
• p111 Thus, Self-development is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our being truly ourselves on all three levels. So George's own inner being has to become part of his job. He has to live on the top (intrinsic) level in whatever he does, and he -- George himself -- has to do it; nobody else can live there for him.
• p113 You feel wonderful to be alive. Faith is exactly this -- to feel good in the world and to feel that the world is good.
• p117 I used to think I was the most important guy in creation. Now I'm not so sure. Even so, my wife hes to keep reminding me, "Be humble."
• p117 I know a fellow who is an engineer, one of the most lovable persons I know. He has many properties of faith, but he also has a deep-seated, intrinsic fear. He lacks serenity, is often on the defensive, is not expansive but narrow, and is easily hurt. Actually he is extremely successful in a material way, with a beautiful home and a garage full of Cadillacs. But he is always fearful he will lose all he has tomorrow. He feels he's no good; he shouldn't have been born; life isn't really worth the trouble.
• p121 A wife who loves is usually more mature than a man. She loves you as a husband, not as an important or not-so-important man, and she may love you when you're asleep more than at any other time. To women, both the intellectual and -- if true women -- the social play small roles relative to love and compassion. Man are often lured by their intellectual and social power to insensitivity and disregard of the spiritual. Having to deal directly with the creation of life, women are usually more sensitive to intrinsic value.
• p125 If, on the other hand, my life does have meaning for me, I will be quite concerned about the organization I work for, because it would have to dovetail with my own meaning. It it doesn't and I keep on working for it, I'm either a fake or unhappy or both. I cheat myself. I waste the divine capital that I am. I sell myself to the world, and I will pay for this betrayal by neurosis, by drinking too much, or by otherwise destroying my self, as if I ware saying that I am not worth the gift of life.
• p127 For if the organization helps me to fulfill my purpose, I certainly will want to contribute one hundred percent of myself instead of holding back forty percent -- as studies have shown the average worker does -- and hurting myself as well as the company.

Chapter 4 - My self and religion

• p131 For me, Jesus is that person who for the first time in human history articulated the nature of man's infinity in God. He gave added emphasis to the place of man in religious concepts.
• p133 For unless you like your Self you cannot like anybody else. Unless you fell that you are important, nothing can be important to you. You must make yourself worthy of yourself to be worthy of your fellow man and of God. If you don't take yourself seriously, if you take yourself as an accident that might just s well not have happened, then you are lost; you cannot fulfill the meaning of your life.
• p135 To those of us who aspire to Christianity, Jesus is he who came so that we may live, in the mediator between us and God. He must not be an historical character in space and time; the minute he becomes such we lose him and we lose Christianity. He must be outside of space and time, an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic person. We can understand Jesus only if we have a living relationship with him, as if he were along at our side -- the eternal contemporary.
• p142 The entire world is nothing in comparison with human personality, with the unique person of man.
• p145 He meant what he said: offer the other cheek also to be smitten.This, Jesus implies, will take the wind out of the sail of the other's anger, for there is no greater incentive for evil-doing than resistance to it. When you don't resist evil, you drain the fun from it. Nothing is more disconcerting to a ruffian than politeness.
• p146 What is the secret? You have to find a logic that is different from that of the evildoer but which embraces both him and you. Since his logic is of the finite -- where he is on one side and you are on the other -- the surest way is to insert the logic of the infinite into the situation. This will embrace you and him on the same level, lifting him to yours. It will let him save face and make him understand you, through in his own, sometimes curious way.
• p149 We need desperately to develop our sensitivity to evil, just as we need to develop our sensitivity to good, for we cannot overcome that which we don't know. So few people can smell evil, sensitivity or vicariously, precisely because they have failed to develop their sense of values.
• p150 These people, of course, do not want to be evil. They think they do good -- as did Hitler. Somehow their values must be reversed; what they call "good" must be shown to be evil, and what they call "evil" to be good. This again, evil must be overcome by good -- and by love.
• p151 If you have conformed all your life, have never done anything particularly bad or anything particularly good, have lived according to the rules and customs, systemically and extrinsically, you will never even know what moral depth you have. You have never developed a sensitivity for either good or evil. You are a social machine, and there cannot be much joy in Heaven for a zombie.
• p152 I believe the great impression Pope John XXIII made on all mankind was because he, with articulate goodness, filled the vacuum the churches had left. Alas, his work did not lead to action and, like Jesus, he left us no method to follow it up.
• p152 How often do we turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give the man out cloak? How often do we try to overcome evil by good?
• p153 Our lore is full of stories of men laying down their lives for the sake of what they think or what they have or what they want; but how many have laid down what they think or have or want for the sake of their lives?

Chapter 5 - It's not too late

• p161 Human being as individuals generally want the good, but as soon as they start thinking and acting in collective terms, i.e., in terms of a group, a mob, a race, a state, a nation, they tend to fall easy prey to evil. Since in the systemic only the system counts, all evil can be given a systemic status and thus appear justified. The legal system in particular has been used to justify evil.
• p163 There is nothing wrong with our war logic; only the logic itself is wrong.
• p168 If, however, you value thinking most highly, and there is a flaw in your thinking, then you value most highly something which is faulty, and all your valuation, all your history, goes wrong.
• p170 It is the result of a trilogy of tragedies. The first was the Tragedy of Rome -- military despotism; the second, the Tragedy of Feudalism -- military absolutism; the third, the Tragedy of Democracy -- military giantism. The process is the same throughout, repeated on ever higher turns of the spiral of history: the exploitation of the civil -- with its rhythm of birth, life, love, and death -- by military state.
• p179 Neither the German not the Russian nor the American nor, for that matter, the French, the English, the Indian, the Chinese, or any other revolution has challenged the supremacy of the state's military power over the life and death of its citizens. Revolutions as far have meant nothing but the transition of sovereign power from owners to managers. The machine grinds on not, as before, at the ruler's command, but "with the consent of the governed." It infiltrates today's political institutions. Juridical safeguards such as separation of power, bills or rights, guarantees of individual freedom, civil liberties, and the like scratch the surface but do not change the core. Every constitution contains an emergency trap door through which the rights, the freedoms, and the liberties of the individual can disappear. Strangely enough, these very rights and liberties come to justify, ideologically, the slaughters of the revolutions and the subsequent "just" wars of the republics. What was done before for the glory of the King is now done for the glory of the People -- for Liberty, for Freedom, for Brotherhood. These human ideals join others, including the idea of Christian love, which at various times have been used to justify murders, massacres, and wars. The United States of America began predominantly as a civil society, with an insistent warning from George Washington "never to run the course which has hitherto marked the Destiny of Nations" and permit its military function to become dominant. Yet even the United States has been drawn into the maelstrom of feudal power apparatus and has build the most powerful, most deadly military machine in all history. Today's nation state is a feudal relic -- but it rides on the wings of a jet stream.
• p183 What can we do about it, you and I? There is no quick, easy solution, but there is a solution. The good takes time; one cannot be good in a hurry. A life can be extinguished in the flick of a second, but how painstakingly must the surgeon work to replace even one torn nerve. This is why peace will not come through so-called strong men. They look for easy and fast solutions. It will come through men of patience, compassion, and humility -- men of faith.
• p186 Our days cries for moral leadership. We must mobilize our compassion and the intrinsic moral goodness of America to break the power chain of divine sovereignties and permit the human state to succeed the military state. For it is the moral goodness of America that makes this country great, the goodness that recognizes the infinite intrinsic value of the human person. We need to translate this moral goodness into international relations. We need to export it, for, in the long run, it -- rather our wealth, our standard of living, and our named power -- is what attracts the rest of the world to America. I have no doubt that the Soviet Union fears our goodness much more than our badness.

I've read this book, Way of the peaceful warrior, quite some time ago (~ December 2010) and wrote down my notes in Czech (as I've read the book in Czech translation).

It's a story about young man, studding university and training for world championship in gymnast. One night he finds a teacher that starts to wisely guide him. This wise man tries to show him what is behind success and achievements. Still even with his guidance, the young man has to "burn his own fingers" to learn.

I'll try to translate my notes. There are not a lot of them:

• Only the wisest sages and fools are not changing.
• Identify your self with what you teach, and teach only what you have identified with.
• Milarepa was looking all around for enlightenment, but could not find the answer anywhere - but one day he met an old man, that was going down a steep mountain road, carrying back-pack on his shoulders. Milarepa instantly knew that this old man knows the secret that he is looking desperately for since ages now. "Please, brother, tell me what you know. What is enlightenment?" Old man smiled at him, put his back-pack down and straightened up his body. "Yes, I understand" told the Milarepa. "Please take my deepest thankfulness. But answer one more question for me please. What comes after enlightenment?" Old man smiled again, picked up his back-pack, put it on his shoulders and continued on his way.
• When a blind man realize that he actually sees, does it mean that the world has changed?
• Happiness is a full tank.
• I had to learn how to live happy and useful life in a world that is feeling outraged when it comes across man that has no problems and doesn't race for anything any more. I found out that happy person with no specific reason for it can be pretty annoying for the others.

Here are my notes from a book called The Complete Neurotic's Notebook written by Mignon McLaughlin which is a book compose of two separate ones "The neurotic's notebook" + "The second neurotic's notebook".

This books are basically a collection of thoughts from Mignon about life.

I noted down a lot of them (see below) and organized them in a group of wise words, women wise words, neurotic thoughts and cynicisms. In exactly this order, having cynicism at the end as least useful. But sometimes it's hard to choose if some thought is wise or cynical. ;-)

Wise words:

• p21 Home is a place you can leave whenever you like, but they can't put you out.
• p24 One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week.
• p25 Children expect to eat when they're hungry; our job is to teach them to eat when there's food.
• p27 Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality.
• p37 There are always a few people you do a lot for, and a few who so a lot for you, but they're not the same people.
• p39 He who shows you his weakness today will show you his brutality tomorrow.
• p39 Women gather together to wear silly hats, eat dainty food, and forget how unresponsive their husbands are. Men gather to talk sports, eat heavy food, and forget how demanding their wives are. Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.
• p44 If you can tell anyone about it, it's not the worst thing you ever did.
• p56 There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been humans beings like that.
• p57 If it came true, it wan't much of a dream.
• p57 We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.
• p58 Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
• p58 We all have a pretty clear understanding of goodness, but it seldom applies to the situation we're in at the moment.
• p58 We hear only half of what is said to us, understand only half of that, believe only half of that, and remember only half of that.
• p59 In life, as in restaurant, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner.
• p60 The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.
• p61 Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part, and does not believe in the play.
• p62 What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
• p62 It is romantic to expect that things will get better, cynical to suppose that they will not, bestial not to care.
• p63 Our friends are seldom capable of telling us any profound truths about ourselves, ant if they were, we would not be capable of listening.
• p64 We are always apologizing to some of our friends for some of our other friends.
• p64 We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.
• p66 It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.
• p67 The people you admire most you usually don't know very well.
• p68 When we meet someone who truly sees good in everyone, it is hard to believe that he knows the same people we do.
• p68 If you know of wounding thing to say, sooner or later you'll say them.
• p70 It takes so little to start a cult: just a man who can't stop talking.
• p72 Every society honours its live conformists, and dead troublemakers.
• p72 Psychiatrists are terrible ads for themselves, like dermatologist with acne.
• p75 A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
• p76 No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves.
• p78 God and the devil lose to a common enemy: inertia.
• p79 Despair is anger with no place to go.
• p80 The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine.
• p82 We'd all like a reputation for generosity, and we'd like to buy it cheap.
• p83 If insulation is what you're after, get rich quick.
• p84 Happiness is like the penny candy of our youth: we got a lot more for our money back when we had no money.
• p84 An artist is a socially unattractive person whom socially attractive people make money out of.
• p85 Plan for masochists: Pay now, live later.
• p86 Young lovers and young nations face the same problem: after orgasm, what?
• p88 In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire.
• p88 When I was a child, nobody died; but now it happens all the time.
• p89 Don't fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all.
• p89 As the twig is bent, the tree won't grow.
• p92 Being the youngest always seems such fun, except to the one who is.
• p93 The past is rich in lessons from which we would greatly profit except that the present is always so full of Special Circumstances.
• p94 Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.
• p95 How strange that the young should always think the world is against them - when in fact that is the only time it is for them.
• p96 What you were sure of yesterday, you know now to be false, but what you are sure of today is absolutely true.
• p96 The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
• p102 People often say they love each other when they really don't, but it's strange how often just saying it makes it come true.
• p105 In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
• p107 We can all do without love, but not much.
• p110 Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.
• p112 If your child doesn't think you're wonderful, you certainly aren't.
• p115 We don't mind our children having different virtues from ours, but it seems disloyal of them to have different faults.
• p116 If your children spend most of their time in other people's houses, you're lucky; if they all congregate at your house, you're blessed.
• p117 The ideal home: big enough for you to hear the children, but not very well.
• p118 Trust a woman, and not a man, in casual moments; a man, and not a woman, in crucial ones. For that's when each tends to tell the truth.
• p119 No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
• p128 Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.
• p130 Forget about calories - *everything* makes thin people thinner, and fat people fatter.
• p131 Don't be yourself - be someone a little nicer.
• p135 A sense of humor is a major defence against minor troubles.
• p135 Charm makes everyone feel wonderful except, often, its possessor.
• p141 Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette.
• p147 The time we can often do something wonderful is when we are suppose to be doing something else.
• p148 Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions.
• p150 If people find your silences interesting, don't disillusion them.
• p151 Anybody can sit and talk all night, but it takes iron discipline to listen for fifteen minutes.
• p153 Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't.
• p153 It's easier to part with a friend than an opinion.
• p153 To talk easily with people, you must firmly believe that either you or they are interesting. And even then it's not easy.
• p156 Every now and then you run across radiantly attractive people, and you're delighted to find they adore you, till you realize that they adore just about everybody - and that's what's made them radiantly attractive.
• p161 When a nation has been defeated and loses its pride, a leader always springs up who restores it, in psychopathic doses.
• p161 There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
• p162 Creative people usually head for the big cities: more than the theatres, museums or libraries, they need each other.
• p164 When threatened, the first thing a democracy gives up is democracy.
• p165 It took man thousands of years to put word down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't.
• p166 I dare to drink the water when there is reason to doubt, yet cannot make the same concession to God.
• p167 My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.
• p167 Never is a long, long word, but it's less frustrating than "God knows when."
• p169 Basis for a workable religion: when you have nothing better to do, do something for someone else.
• p169 The young do not need God, and the old cannot find Him.
• p170 "Your money, or your life." We know what to do when a burglar makes this demand of us, but not when God does.
• p170 Don't look for God where He is needed most; if you didn't bring Him there, He isn't there.
• p173 Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.
• p173 There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we all count ourselves among them.
• p176 I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did: The only problem that money can solve are money problems.
• p178 Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.
• p179 There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.
• p179 The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it suceeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.
• p180 Vengefulness is self-pity's first cousin, loneliness its favorite climate, whisky its best friend.
• p180 The young quickly learn to love and be loved, to betray and be betrayed. The only further lesson maturity can teach them is how to keep from paying too high a price.
• p182 When the salt has lost its savor, pepper makes a poor substitute.
• p182 After twenty, we demand more of love, but not with any practical hope of receiving it.
• p183 In months, not years, the mask becomes the face.
• p183 Your life is made up of years that mean nothing, moments that mean all.
• p184 There are people who get everything done, and people who get nothing done, and hardly anyone in between.
• p185 Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.
• p187 Fine feathers make fine birds, until it comes time to fly.
• p187 The human comedy can keep amusing you, but only if you keep your distance.
• p188 It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.
• p188 People determined to hide their feelings are usually nonstop talkers.
• p190 If only we could be old and sick while we're still young and healthy enough to put up with it!
• p191 Epitaph for the human race: We've been terrible, but dear God how we've paid for it.

Women wise words:

• p33 Nymphomaniac: woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.
• p33 Women do not live longer then men; they only exist longer.
• p100 Every wife who doesn't much love her husband considers it his fault.
• p100 Love is to man an embarrassment, even the word; it is to woman an excuse for existence, especially the word.
• p101 If you see right through him, it's because you do not want him.
• p101 When a husband and wife agree all the time, he's henpecked.
• p102 Love requires a willingness to die; marriage, a willingness to live.
• p103 When a man stops being in love with you, it's no consolation to remind yourself that you may not have been in love with him in the first place.
• p103 Marriage is the refuge of the very lonely, and the very self-sufficient.
• p105 Love is fact for women, fiction for men.
• p105 A woman needs at least one man on whom to test her sense of power; he's the wrong man to marry, though.
• p106 Women insist upon marriage and then hate it; men are dragged there and then love it.
• p107 If marriage is your object, you'd better start loving your subject.
• p108 What's for dinner?" is the only question many husbands ask their wives, and the only one which they care about the answer.
• p108 No wife can forgive her husband for saying angry things to her and then placidly going to sleep.
• p109 A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
• p109 A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species.
• p111 It's easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child - at least till you try to get him to do something.
• p115 A marriage without children is like a Chinese dinner without rice: the flavor may be there, but not the substance.
• p118 Men are convinced that women have it easy, but they haven't convinced many women.
• p126 There are three kind of women: those who enjoy losing to a man, those who enjoy losing to a woman, and those who just enjoy losing.
• p128 Ask a woman how she feels, and she tells you. Ask a lady, and she says, "Fine, thank, you."
• p132 As every woman knows, laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and some man will comfort you.
• p187 I have an understanding with my husband: on any day when I haven't done any writing, I must play him three games of chess. The trouble is, if I have been working, I enjoy the chess; if not, all I want to play is Russian roulette.

Neurotic thoughts:

• p29 No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.
• p41 The neurotic has perfect vision in one eye, but he cannot remember which.
• p45 Reason tells us that money will not buy happiness; passion says it will. Reason tells us virtue is it's own reward; passion demands more. Reason tells us passion will be our undoing; passion replies that reason is cold and dead. Both seem to speak truth, so we listen to both, and remain neurotic.
• p51 The neurotic wants to be alone - but he wants to be alone with someone else.
• p60 As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.
• p94 We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
• p95 We all spend our lives in solitary confinement, but the neurotic believes he's the only one.
• p130 Neurotics dream of a good life, or a great suicide note.
• p135 Without sex, alcohol, sleeping pills, you are always with yourself.
• p138 It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have broken. It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.
• p139 Of course no one is so sensitive as you, but try to remember they think they are.
• p140 When we say "If I don't do it, someone else will," we mean, of course, some other son of a bitch.
• p141 If I knew what I was so anxious about, I wouldn't be so anxious.
• p142 Your best work always seems to have been done by someone else.
• p142 The way the neurotic sees it: bars on his door mean that he's locked in; bars on your door mean that he's locked out.
• p142 Love gives no warning and no quarter; it is sneaky and cruel; if we weren't so lonely, we'd never put up with it.
• p146 Neurotics chase after people and jobs they don't really want, just to prove that they're like everybody else - which is the last thing they really want.
• p147 When you're nervous it makes you cranky, and when, you're cranky it makes people hostile, and when people are hostile it makes you nervous.
• p150 No matter how many times you change jobs or mates or neighbourhoods, there's always someone in your life you can't get along with.
• p151 Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbours.
• p152 The neurotic always wishes people would let him alone - until they do.
• p159 Neurotics make poor patriots; if you're ashamed of something as big as yourself, it's hard to be proud of something as small as your country.
• p166 Neurotics are afraid to pray: God might be listening.
• p169 The neurotic believes that life has meaning, but that his life hasn't.
• p176 Neurotics look on sex and money as just two more weapons.
• p177 Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there's no such thing as exactly enough.
• p178 The habit of saving money is hard to acquire, and even harder to break.
• p185 For neurotics, success is a five-minute wonder; failure, a five-year plan.
• p188 The neurotics boat keeps drifting farther and farther out to sea, and people keep asking him why he's so nervous.
• p189 Neurotics expect you to remember all the things that they tell you, and many that they don't.

Cynicisms:

• p9 No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.
• p13 When desire has been satisfied, we can begin to think seriously about love.
• p19 The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.
• p42 The moment we're born they try to make us cry, and it sometimes seems as though they never stop.
• p47 From time to time we encounter people of a cheerful, kindly, envious nature. They usually run elevators.
• p48 We long for self-confidence, till we look at the people who have it.
• p51 Pessimism is as silly as optimism, but less destructive.
• p52 We often pray to be better, when in truth we only want to feel better.
• p54 We listen only to those who flatter, amuse, or comfort us, and you know that's not many people.
• p63 Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.
• p63 We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter.
• p76 We have to call it "freedom": who'd want to die for "a lesser tyranny"?
• p77 I believe that of all the people in the world, only a certain tiny percentage is truly good; and I also believe that this percentage has remained mysteriously constant since the beginning of man.
• p77 So long as God reveals Himself, or doesn't, He is behaving like God.
• p114 Our children seem to have wonderful taste, or none - depending, of course, on whether or not they agree with us.
• p133 A cynic is one who believes it matters not whether you win, nor how you play the game.
• p133 People will disapprove of you if you're unhappy, or if you're happy in The Wrong Way.
• p136 Other people's truth may comfort us, but only our own persuades us.
• p140 The next voice you hear will undoubtedly be your own.
• p143 Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough.
• p145 With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.
• p149 The time to begin most things is ten years ago.
• p160 Peace and Prosperity make nice campaign slogans. And who knows? They might even work some day, on some other planet.
• p174 Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.
• p174 We're all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
• p186 Every human being is born wanting to do his best, at least until he tries it a few times and gets slapped down.

is a new book written by Derek Sivers. It was a pleasure to read through as it is a short book with lots of interesting thoughts using simple common sense and his years of experience leading a business.

It's really modern American style of doing business => build from scratch, sell in couple of years for a huge price, blog about it and write a motivational book. :-)

Anyway here are my notes from the book:

• p3 Business is not about money. It's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
• p3 Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what's not working.
• p9 If you think your life's purpose needs to hit you like a lightning bolt, you'll overlook the little day-to-day things that fascinate you.
• p13 No plan survives first contact with customers. --Steve Blank
• p20 As your business grows, never let the leeches sucker you into all that stuff they pretend you need.
• p23 No way. Out of the question. That would be like puting a coke machine in a monastery. I'm not doing this to make money.
• p31 But even well-meaning companies accidentally get trapped in survival mode. A business is started to solve a problem. But if the problem was truly solved, that business would no longer be needed! So the business accidentally or unconsciously keeps the problem around so that they can keep solving it for a fee.
• p32 If you set up your business like you don't need the money, people are happier to pay you.
• p43 Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company.
• p50 As the company grew, everyone was surprised that I still did all the programming myself. But for an Internet business, outsourcing the programming would be like a band outsourcing the songwriting!
• p51 You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsourced everything to the experts. But what's the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right?
• p65 Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let him do it.
• p67 Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don't forget it.
• p70 I thought of trying to repair relationships with each of the eightfive employees, over hundreds of hours of talking. But if you've ever had a romance break up, you know that sometimes it's beyond repair.
• p77 No matter which goal you choose, there will be lots of people telling you you're wrong.
• p77 You'll notice that as my company got bigger, my stories about it were less happy. That was my lesson learned. I'm happier with five employees than with eighty-five, and happiest working alone.

I don't agree with the idea of "romance break up beyond repair" and "happy working alone". Yes it's damn hard to cope with people, with a little help of romance we can get started, but every romance will eventually come to an end one day and there is also something beyond it. In my opinion the right way to do, is to keep the tension and stay in the tragic gap. Which might be really hard and it's really tempting to release the pain and sell a company like Derek did.

Here are my notes from the book "On Bullshit" written by Harry G. Frankfurt:

• p22 The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.
• p33 Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
• p43 Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as he corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.
• p56 His eye is not on facts at all, as the eye of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he say. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
• 61 He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does; and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
• p62 Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays the at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased.
• p63 Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, ...

Good essay, well written, nice bullshitting, would be a great blog post or even introduction to a whole book, but I'm not really convinced that it's worth $9.95. But all in all I've enjoyed reading it.

Summary of Anthony De Mello book - Awareness. It was initially created by Malcolm and then I've added few more points to it. So it's neither his work, nor mine. But it's fun :-) Go on, be doubtful and disagree please.

• The S (far right side) = the overview, big picture, the summary of what the author is saying: Wake up!
• The I (far left side) = the author's analysis of the problem, and the current position of people in relation to the big picture: They're Asleep!
• The E (center) = the role the 'I' has in getting across from the problem to the solution, or from sleeping to waking.
• The S (far right again) = is the result, end conclusion, the goal of traveling the 'E' to get to the other side: Enlightenment, Peace, Love etc....

Just finished reading "A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life" a book from Parker J. Palmer that I've received from Malcom.

The main keyword of the book is the "Soul":

• p57 But a quick disclaimer is in order, since formation sometimes means a process quite contrary to the one described in this book - a process in which the pressure of orthodox doctrine, sacred text, and institutional authority is applied to the misshapen soul in order to conform it to the shape dictated by some theology. This approach is rooted in the idea that we are born with souls deformed be sin, and our situation is hopeless until the authorities "form" us properly.
• p57 Here formation flows from the belief that we are born with souls in perfect form. As time goes on, we are subject to powers of deformation, from within as well as without, that twist us into shapes alien to the shape of the soul. But the soul never loses its original form and never stops calling us back to our birthright integrity.

For Palmer soul, for others heart, love, spirituality, awareness, God, ... It doesn't matter what concept we use, but the idea is that every single person on this planet is good inside. It is similar to the Neills:

Another interesting concepts from the book are "Divided life", "Circle of Trust", "Tragic gap" and "Tension".

The "Divided life":

• p6 The divided life comes in many and varied forms. To cite just a few examples, it is the life we lead when:
  • We refuse to invest ourselves in our work, diminishing its quality and distancing ourselves from those it is meant to serve
  • We make our living at jobs that violate our basic values, even when survival does not absolutely demand it
  • We remain in settings or relationships that steadily kill off our spirits
  • We harbor secrets to achive personal gain at the expense of other people
  • We hide our beliefs from those who disagree with us to avoid conflict, challenge and change
  • We conceal our true identities for fear of being criticized, shunned or attacked

The "Circle of Trust" is group of people that are meeting to speak and enjoy each other while not trying to fix each other problems, believing in the strength of each other to find the right path:

• p51 Being Alone Together - A Community of Solitudes - Our disasters come from letting nothing live for itself, from the longing we have to pull everything, even friends, into ourselves, and let nothing alone.
• p52 Convinced that people lack inner guidance and wishing to "help" them, we feel obliged to tell others what we think they need to know and how we think they ought to live. Countless disasters originate here - between parents and children, teachers and students, supervisors and employees - originate, that is, in presumptuous advice - giving that leaves the other feeling diminished and disrespected.
• p61 When we sit with a dying person, we gain two critical insights into what it means to "be alone together". First, we realize that we must abandon the arrogance that often distorts our relationships - the arrogance of believing that we have the answer to the other person's problem. When we sit with a dying person, we understand that what is before us is not a "problem to be solved" but a mystery to be honored. As we find a way to stand respectfully on the edge of that mystery, we start to see that all our relationships would be deepened if we could play the fixer role less frequently. Second, when we sit with a dying person, we realize that we must overcome the fear that often distorts our relationships - the fear that causes us to turn away when the other reveals something too vexing, painful, or ugly to bear. Death may be all of this and more.

Similar to what Anthony de Mello says:

The "Tragic gap" with keeping "Tension" were a new ideas to me:

• p167 Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
  there is field. I'll meet you there.
  When the soul lies down in that grass,
  the world is too full to talk about.
  Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
  doesn't make any sense.
• p175 The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap - a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed.
• p180 ... the people who achieved the greatest good are those who have the greatest capacity to stand in the tragic gap. Of course, results come more slowly when we hold the tension instead of calling for a vote or sending in the troops.

This all together were a strong but non-violent ideas and views on our world.

As usual at the end comes the list of notes from the book that caught my attention:

• p15 And the closer we get to adulthood, the more we stifle the the imagination that journey requires. Why? Because imagining other possibilities for our lives would remind us of the painful gap between who we most truly are and the role we play in so-called real world.
• p24 OK, I'll play this game for a while. But I don't get paid enough to worry about stuff like this. I just want to do my job and get back home, where I have life, without having to take my work with me. Besides, the managers are going to figure out how to get their way with all this. I'll play the circle game, but I won't invest myself in it.
• p34 Because we so quickly blame our problems on forces "out there," we need to see how often consipre in our own deformation: for every external power bent on twisting us out of shape, there is a potential collaborator within us. When our impulse to tell the truth is thwarted by threats of punishment, it is because we value security over being truthful. When our impulse to side with weak is thwarted by threats of lost social standing, it is because we value popularity over being a pariah.
• p37 In my own case, at any rate, depression was the soul's call to stop, turn around, go back, and look for path I could negotiate. If one ignores that call and doggedly presses on, the depression that comes from getting crosswise with true self can yield something worse than melancholy and lassitude: a deep desire to end one's life.
  Such was the case with me, and looking back, I understand why. When I was living my outer life at great remove from inner truth, I was not merely on the wrong path: I was killing my selfhood with every step I took. When one's life is a walking death, the step into literal death can seem very easy to take. Medication may offer temporary relief from depressions of this sort, but the real cure goes beyond drugs. We can reclaim our lives only be choosing to live divided no more. It is a choice so daunting - or so it seems in the mids of depression - that we are unlikely to make it until our pain becomes unberable, the pain that comes from denying or defying true self.
• p38 Instead, I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be - an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others.
• p42 I was blessed with family where it felt safe to be myself, so my dividedness did not begin at home. But I did not feel safe at school, despite my capacity to act the role of a "successful" and "popular" student, words I put in quotation marks because the role felt so fraudulent to me. While I played my onstage part, my true self hid out backstage, fearful that the world would crush its deepest values and beliefs, its fragile hopes and yearnings. The farther I went with my education, the less safe school became. In graduate school, especially, my emotional and spiritual survival seemed to depend on keeping my truth tucked away.
• p43 But I soon learned that graduate school was a picnic compared to the world of work. The deeper I moved into that world. The more need I felt to wall off my true self - trying, to put it simply, to appear smarter and tougher than I really was.
• p44 I remember with regret the arrogance that overcame me in my thirties when I became privately judgemental of many people I knew - a posture that was, of course, no more than projected self-doubt. From time to time, courageous friends tried to shed light on my shadow, with predictable results: I judged them to be arrogant and refused to listen.
• p53 Like most of us, Linda knew how to use rejection to reinforce her view of the world.
• p55 Let the person who cannot be alone beware of community. Let the person who is not in community beware of being alone.
• p64 Rilke's image of love offers us a third possibility. Instead of fixing up, or letting down, people who have a problem, we stand with simple attentiveness at the borders of their solitude - trusting that they have within themselves whatever resources they need and that our attentiveness can help bring those resources into play.
• p67 But this time, Tim said something new. "For the past year and a half," he told his principal, "I've been sitting with this group of teachers who've been exploring their inner lives - and I've begun to realize that I have one, too! I can see now that I've been lying to myself, and to you, about why I won't go to the summer institute. "The truth is, I'm afraid. I'm afraid I won't understand what they are saying. I'm afraid that what I do understand will make me feel like I've been teaching the wrong way for twenty years. I'm afraid I'll come home from that institute feeling like I'm over the hill. I still don't want to go, but at least I can be honest with you about why." Tim paused for a moment and then continued. "My principal and I sat there in silence for a while, string at the floor. Then he looked up at me and said. 'You know what? I'm afraid, too. Let's go together.'"
• p72 Why? Because the fact that you understand the danger means that you are sane, and only pilots who are crazy can be relieved of their duties. So you must keep flying even though you are crazy to do so! Catch-22 has proven to be an apt image for out time, which seems full of "problematic situations whose only solution is denied by circumstances inherent in the problem".
• p82 As we look out upon the winter landscape of our lives, it seems clear that whatever was seeded in the fall is now buried deep in the snow, frozen over and winter killed. Many demoralized people recognize this "dead of winter" metaphor as an all-too-apt description of their bleak inner lives. Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realize that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth.
• p85 We seem to have forgotten that the environment in which we meet has an impact on the quality of what happens within us and between us.
• p91 But we soon come to understand that whatever we say about the poem, we are saying about ourselves.
• p162 I am blessed to live in a democracy, not a totalitarian state. But the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb. There is a classic fable apropos of all this that can teach us much about the political potentials of both laughter and silence: Hans Christian Andersen's tale, "The Emperor's New Suit".
• p164 First, satirical laughter and dissenting silence are nonviolent ways of fomenting social change. People who turn to nonviolence in the face of cruelty and injustice have a much higher claim to good manners that leaders who clothe themselves in piosity and patriotism to justify economic and military violence.
• p164 In laughter, we learn to discern the difference between reality and illusion, which serves us well amid the smoke and mirrors of political life. In silence, we remember that someday we will die, which gives us the courage to speak our truth, no matter what the punishment may be.
• p178 And where does that arrogance come from? The answer, I think, is fear. The more insecure I feel, the more arrogant I tend to become, and the most arrogant people I know are also the most insecure. The arrogant ego does not like it when we hold tension, fearful of losing it's status if we lose the battle at hand.
• p183 "Through those retreats, I rediscovered a generosity of heart and developed a taste for suffering". What voice speaks such words? Not the voice of intellect, which talks about facts and theories. Not the voice of emotion, which talks about joy and anger. Not the voice of will, which talks about effort and results. Not the voice of ego, which talks about pride and shame. Only the soul, I think, is able to speak words like this.

I just finished reading a book titled "Vital Lies, Simple Truths - The Psychology of Self-Deception" by Daniel Goleman. The book tries to reveal the truth about why do we lie to our self and to the others. The modern type of pain - anxiety - has a modern type of defense - the lies and self-deception - in case of a long lasting anxiety that can not be changed.

• p51 "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

The main topics of the book are awareness, blind-spots, lacunas, schemas and frames:

• p22 My thesis, in sum, revolves around these premises: The mind can protect itself against anxiety by dimming awareness. This mechanism creates a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behavior from the psychological to the social.
• p107 Lacunas are psychological analogues of the opioids and their antiattention effects. Lacunas are black holes of the mind, diverting attention from select bits of subjective reality - specifically, certain anxiety-evoking information. They operate on attention like a magician misdirecting his audience to look over there, while over here a key prop slips out of sign.
• p77 The notion of schemas is itself a schema. As such, it is the most promising account we have to explain to ourselves. Schemas are the organizing dynamic of knowledge. To realize how they operate is to understand understanding.
• p80 Schemas not only determine what we will notice: they also determine what we do not notice.
• p197 A frame, for example, is the understanding that we are at play, or that "this is a sales call," or that "we are dating". Each of those definitions of social events determines what is appropriate to the moment and what is not; what is to be considered and what ignored; what, in short, the going reality involves.
• p209 Culture is a basket of frames. To the degree that frames differ from culture to culture, contacts between people from different lands can be sticky. For example, bribery is a normal part of doing business in much of the world, a fact that makes Americans indignant.

It is an interesting parallel to the book of Awareness from Anthony De Mello. While the book of Awareness was a spiritual book this one is based on scientific facts from the psychological research about how our mind operates with loads of citations. The basic concept is:

• p241 Consciousness, we have seen, runs along parallel, interlinked tracks, most of them outside awareness; awareness is the last stop - and not always an essential one - in the flow of information through the mind. Crucial decisions as to what should and should not enter awareness are made in the unconscious mind. Thus that essentially human ability, self-awareness, brings with it the capacity for self-deception.

Here is the list of ways how we lie or change the reality to our selves:

• p120 (Repression: Forgetting and forgetting one has forgotten) What's more, once repressed, the fact that information has been repressed is forgotten, and so there is no impetus to try to remember it.
• p120 (Denial and reversal: What is so is not the case; the opposite is the case) Reversal carries denial one step further. The fact is denied, then transformed into its opposite: "I hate you" becomes "I love you"; "I am sad" changes to "I am happy". Reversal (sometimes called "reaction formation") is a handy way to sanitize unruly impulses. The urge to be messy is transformed into excessive cleanliness; anger surfaces as smothering nurturance.
• p120 (Projection: What is inside is cast outside) If one's feelings are too much to bear, the mind can handle them at a distance. One way to distance feeling is to act as if it were not one's own. The formula for projection of one's feelings onto someone else includes two parts: denial and displacement.
• p121 (Isolation: Events without feelings) Isolation is a partial blanking out of experience, a semi-denial. An unpleasant event is not repressed, but the feelings it evokes are.
• p121 (Rationalization: I give myself a cover story) Rationalizations are lies so slick we can get away with telling them not only to ourselves, but even to others, without flinching. "It's for your own good" and "This hurts me more than it hurts you" signal rationalization at work, a favored defense among intellectuals, whose psychological talents include inventing convincing excuses and alibis.
• p121 (Sublimation: Replace the threatening with the safe) Sublimation allows instincts to be channeled rather than repressed, as they are in the more neurotic defenses. Urges are acknowledged, albeit in a modified form. The impulse to steal is reincarnated as a career in banking; the scream masquerades as song; the urge to rape dons the courtship; the compulsion to maim resurfaces as the surgeon's artistry. Sublimation, Freud argued, is the great civilizer, the force which keeps mankind manageable and makes human progress possible.
• p122 (Selective inattention: I don't see what I don't like) The utter simplicity of selective inattention - and its ubiquity in everyday life - qualifies it as a generic defense, perhaps the most common.
• p122 (Automatism: I don't notice what I do) Certain of these automatized activities cover up elements of experience that might make us uncomfortable if we fully realized our motives or objectives. Automatism allows entire sequences of such behavior to go on without our having to notice either that they happened or the troubling urges they might signify.

I realized what is and why is the psychoanalysis and psychotherapy important:

• p127 The essence of analysis, then, is restoring awareness of what we fail to notice - and fail to notice that we fail to notice.
• p116 According to Freud, the penalty for repression is repetition. Painful experiences not dealt with are, unconsciously, repeated. We do not quite realize that we are repeating ourselves, because the very diversionary schemas we are repeating keep the fact of their repetition from awareness. On the one hand, we forget we have done this before and, on the other, do not quite realize what we are doing again. The self-deception is complete.

I found the book really mind stretching and would recommend it to anyone who is curious enough about why our today world operate like it does. While understanding is the first step, the book offers just a few hints what to do with self-deception and most important with groupthink.

The rest are just my notes of more interesting thoughts from the book:

• p13 Self-deception operates both at the level of individual mind, and in the collective awareness of the group. To belong to a group of any sort, the tacit price of membership is to agree not to notice one's own feelings of uneasiness and misgiving, and certainly not to question anything that challenges the group's way of doing things.
• p14 It is a paradox of our time that those with power are too comfortable to notice the pain of those who suffer, and those who suffer have no power.
• p17 Or, as the now fully grown child of an alcoholic put it, "In our family there were two very clear rules: the first was that there is nothing wrong her, and the second was, don't tell anyone."
• p21 "Indeed," suggests the neuroscientist Monte Buchsbaum, "filtering or coping with the tremendous information overload that the human eye, ear, and other sense organs can dump upon the central nervous system may be one of the major functions of the cerebral cortex."
• p24 The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
• p25 My aim is to ponder our collective predicament: if we so easily full ourselves into subtle sleep, how can we awaken? The first step in that, it seems to me, is to notice how it is that we are asleep.
• p35 ACTH heightens attention and sensitizes the nervous system to pain, while endorphins do just the reverse. ... The interaction between ACTH and endorphins is orchestrated, in part, by timing. ... The first response to an alarm alerts us to the danger; the second stroke allows n obliviousness to pain.
• p51 Technically speaking, "coping" is the term for a range of cognitive maneuvers that relieve stress arousal by changing one's own reaction rather than altering the stressful situation itself.
• p53 For many serious sources of stress in life, there's little or nothing that can be done to change things. If so, you're better off if you do nothing except take care of your feelings ... healthy people use palliatives all the time, with no ill effect. Having a drink or taking tranquilizers are palliatives. So is denial, intellectualizing, and avoiding negative thoughts. When they don't prevent adaptive action, they help greatly.
• p68 But contemporary researchers have adopted a rather radical premise: that much or most consequential activity in the mind goes on outside awareness.
• p80 There is always more to see than anyone sees, no more to know than anyone knows. Why don't we see it, why don't we bother to know it?
• p96 If this is true it should be forgotten, and if it is forgotten, it will probably not be true.
• p103 The child's history of praise or censure comes to define his experience of himself. Three sorts of experience are key to identity. Sullivan writes, "With rewards, with the anxiety there comes an initial personification of three phases of what presently will be me." He calls these three personifications "good-me", "bad-me", and "not-me".
• p105 "Even before the end of infancy," says Sullivan, "it is observable that these unattainable objects come to be treated as if they did not exist." If I can't have it, says the infant in effect, I will deny it.
• p105 That framework and data show, in modern terms, how the self-system protects us against anxiety by skewing attention.
• p109 We all do that. There may be some painful experiences in your life which, when you start to think about, you simply decide at some level not to pursue. You're not going to be aware of that painful event. So you avoid using your usual recall strategies. You could probably get pretty skilled at it - at not remembering what's painful.
• p112 Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
• p124 What can't be seen is hard to change. ... The dance-away lover seems doomed to an endless cycle of romances with stary-eyed beginnings and tearful endings. The abrasive manager somehow keeps rubbing up against recalcitrant employees. The compulsive workaholic just can't seems to get his wife to understand his pressing need to bring work home at nigh. Our defenses insulate us from the vital lie at the heart of our misery.
• p126 This mental operation Miss Freud refers to as "defense by means of ridicule and scorn".
• p131 What may have been at first a serendipitous discovery in the battle against anxiety comes to define our mode or perception and response to the world. Becoming adept at such strategies means that we favor some parts of experience while blocking off others. We set bounds on the range of our thoughts and feelings, limit our freedom of perception and action, in order to feel at peace.
• p133 You artificially inflate a small area of the world, give it a higher value in the horizon of your perception and action. And you do this because it represents an area that you can firmly hold on to, that you can skillfully manipulate, that you can use easily to justify yourself - your actions, your sense of self, your option in the world.
• p138 The weakness of The Detective's attentional style is related to its strengths. His search is driven; it is for something. Its goal is to confirm a preconceived idea. And here falls prey to the danger Sherlock Holmes warned against: "One begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts."
• p139 Shapiro goes on to observe that attention rigidly focused on selective evidence can impose its own conclusions virtually anywhere. Thus, "the suspicious person can be at the same time absolutely right in his perception and absolutely wrong in his judgment".
• p143 The Detective's favored intrapsychic posture, then, is a combination of three maneuvers: denial of his own weakness and ill will, the projection of these aspects of himself onto others, and the ongoing effort to confirm the truth of those projections by searching for telltale clues. ... The lives of such people are frequently haunted by a long string of resentful lovers, unfair bosses, or callous landlords.
• p148 The mastery of defensive maneuvers as protection against the pains of life is a universal aspect of growing up. Every child learns a variety of attentional tactics; healthy children are flexible about which is used when.
• p148 The rule of thumb in coping, remember, is that when one can't do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to change how one perceives it.
• p152 The anger does not evaporate, but it can be made to seem to, or to have other causes and objects. It if won't go away entirely, then a disguise will help. One possibility is to turn it against oneself: that way lies a lifelong conviction of worthlessness.
• p155 From here on we will consider how it is that such self-deceptions can come to be shared. To make this transition requires only that we allow the possibility that people can somehow synchronize their schemas to some degree - that is, come to share a common understanding of how to construe events.
• p155 When we talk, I'm slowly adjusting your mental model of me, and you're adjusting my model of you. When you ask a question, there's a chance to correct some subtle miscommunications. By asking, you implicitly review your understanding of all kinds of things. That gives me a chance to diagnose the cause of your misunderstanding and fix it. Communication is basically a repair process.
• p156 Thus when both partners in the relationship sense the same touchy areas, they can handle the danger by silently agreeing to veer attention away from these trouble spots.
• p157 "This is well-adjusted marriages," he notes "we expect that each partner may keep from the other secrets having to do with financial matters, past experiences, current flirtations, indulgences in 'bad' or expensive habits, personal aspirations and worries, actions of children, true opinions held about relatives or mutual friends, etc."
• p157 Each partner in a working couple ignores areas of shared experience that would threaten the partners' shared sense of a secure, comfortable relationship. She doesn't comment on the looks he gives younger women at the beach; he never mentions his suspicion that she fakes orgasms. Over time, these discretions can become converted into lacunas: they do not notice, and do not notice that they do not notice.
• p158 My belief is that people in groups by and large come to share a vast number of schemas, most of which are communicated without being spoken of directly.
• p161 Madness, said Nietzsche, is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups.
• p161 A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association... and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, so that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.
• p162 The group mind, then, is the leader's writ large. In the group mind "the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideals embodied in the leader."
• p172 Sometimes family ritual can serve to hide a fear, a part of the family schema that is shared by all but is too threatening to be dealt with openly.
• p173 In sum, the family is a group mind of sorts, with many properties of the individual mind. The experience of growing up in a particular family leaves its imprint on the attentional habits of the child, at times with unfortunate consequences, as we saw with the paranoid style. But that pattern marks an extreme of a process that we all go through as our families socialize us unto their world of reality.
• p174 "I have never come across a family," writes R. D. Laing "that does not draw a line somewhere as to what may be put into words, and what words it may be put into." That is, each family has its signature pattern of what aspects of shared experience can be open, what must be closed and denied. When experience is openly shared, the family also has sanctioned language for what may be said about it.
• p175 The ultimate familial lacuna is what Laing calls "The Game of Happy Family," a prototype of how groups collude to keep members feeling comfortable.
• p176 So we are a happy family and we have no secrets from one another. If we are unhappy we have to keep it a secret and we are unhappy that we have to keep it a secret and unhappy that we have to keep secret the fact that we have to keep it a secret and that we are keeping all that secret. But since we are a happy family you can see this difficulty does not arise.
• p176 Michael Weissberg, a psychiatrist, advises that one symptom of an incestuous family can be that it seems too happy.
• p179 The implications of this parallel for understanding group life are great, for, as Freud saw, the family stands as a prototype for the psychology of all groups.
• p180 Consider the sad story of Pitcher, Oklahoma. In 1950 a local mining engineer warned the people of this small mining town to flee. An accident had virtually undermined the town; it might cave in any minute. The next day at the Lion's Club meeting, the town leaders joked about the warning. When one arrived wearing a parachute, they laughed and laughed. The message "it can't happen here" implicit in their hilarity was sadly contradicted within a few days: some of the same men and their families were killed in the cave-in.
• p186 Once the group adopts a belief or decision, individual members are likely to feel it must be right. After all, the members are such great people - how could they be wrong?
• p192 There is some evidence that strong business leaders inadvertently encourage groupthink.
• p204 The new demands of speed and regularity could not tolerate the uneconomic rhythms of peasant life. ... The employer was now defined as the owner of the workers' time and attention during the hours of the workday: he decided the content and rhythm of their activities. The frame of the workday was taking modern shape, and it was the manager who constructed it.
• p205 By the late eighteenth century, the frame of work was bounded by minute hands: the market for clocks and watches boomed as the demand for a synchronized work force grew. With the purchase of workers' time, employers also set to managing attention. The desired state was nothing less than diligent, silent attention to the work at hand - an absolute about-face from the casual routines workers were used to. ... The great innovator of the workplace, Henry Ford, used the assembly line to up the ante of control over his workers' pace. ... This new frame of work met with a new wave of resistance. Even though Ford paid the best wages around, the attrition t his factory was so great that, in 1913, for every 100 additional workers the company wanted, they had to hire 963. The frame of work in this century has gone through two striking shifts: more discipline in the ordering of the sequence and timing of tasks, and a more fragmented and inflexible work schedule. By now we take that frame for granted.
• p208 ... if we allowed ourselves to see what we're doing every day, we might find it just too nauseating. I mean, the way we treat other people.
• p210 But Americans have a style of frank openness that Mexicans may regard as weakness or treachery, that Japanese may see as boorish and crude. In many Asian countries, "no" is used little; "yes" can mean yes, no, or perhaps. (A book for English-speaking managers to help them in their dealing with Japanese is called 'Never Take "Yes" for an Answer.')
• p212 What we think of as "good manners" are, in this perspective, frames for smooth relations in public. When people interact who do not share the same schemas for how to act properly in a situation, the result is embarrassment, social friction, or outright anxiety.
• p213 The robustness of a frame depends entirely on its potency in recruiting new users and in getting those who know it to activate it at the appropriate time. The slow evolution of social custom and proprieties is the history of rise and fall of frames.
• p215 The invasion of the rail car by the Skinheads in an assault; while they did no physical harm, they effectively smashed the other passengers' frames. Their attack exemplifies attentional vampirism. By intruding on the scene in a manner that can't be ignored, the Skinheads force themselves into everyone else's frame. This same imposition is accomplished by obnoxious children, rowdy drunks, manics, and certain sorts of psychotics. All violate the tacit attentional rules that create order in public places.
• p218 When stepping out of frame might bring us face-to-face with information we'd rather not notice, then the frames offers itself as a refuge from painful confrontations. Take as an example white lies.
• p220 When Rosenthal and his co-researcher Bella DePaulo began to study lies and their detection, they were in for a surprise. A decade of research - much of it done by Rosenthal - had shown overwhelmingly that women are far superior to men at reading nonverbal messages: when asked to say what feeling a tone of voice or gesture reflected, women were found to be right much more often than men. But women's accuracy seemed to lag when they were asked to decode leaks, that category of nonverbal clues which unintentionally expose hidden feelings. The more leaky a tone of voice, or the more incongruent a message, the less well women did in interpreting it. Men showed just the opposite pattern: as hidden feelings were revealed by more clues, their accuracy improved. ... Rosenthal and DePaulo interpreted this effect as fitting with women's great social civility. In their view, paying attention to a person's slips and leaks is tantamount to rudeness; indeed, noticing leaks is a form of eavesdropping.
• p221 Perhaps women in our culture have learned that there may be social hazards to knowing too much about other people's feelings. This relative avoidance of eavesdropping by women is consistent with standards of politeness and social smoothingover that are part of the traditional sex role ascribed to women in our culture, a sex role that is only now beginning to change.
• p221 To operate smoothly in the adult world, children must learn when it is socially beneficial to be both a good liar and a poor lie-detector.
• p223 The unhappiness of those who pay an inordinate amount of attention to leaks, then, may be the the social cost they pay for betraying a basic social contact. That seems to account for the paradox that those who see - and say - most clearly what people actually feel can pay a price for their clarity. But such paradox is not unusual within the realm of social deception. There, DePaulo points out, "The rules and regulations and reward systems that usually govern our verbal and nonverbal worlds get turned inside out and upside down. Sources of information such as the face, which are ordinarily extremely informative, can instead be downright misleading, and the kind of skills that we usually get rewarded for - like the ability to understand what other people are really feeling - can instead function like liability. The person who knows when deception is occurring and who knows what other people are really feeling has a more accurate grasp of what the interpersonal world is really like. But in some ways, under some circumstances, maybe being good at understanding social and interpersonal cues is just not good at all."
• p223 White lies are an innocent, even well-intended, form of social deceit. They are a way of protecting the frames that guide a harmonious social life. But the same dynamic can operate to hide facts that are not so innocent. What begins as a white lie, an innocent agreement to keep touchy facts out of frame, can shade over into less innocent social uses.
• p224 Frames create social reality by directing attention toward the business at hand and away from the irrelevant; what is out of frame does not exist, for the moment. For the most part, this selective attention is useful, but the capacity to keep information out of frame can fall prey to a collusion that buys social coziness at the expense of important truths. These collusions create lacunas, warping social reality to suppress unpleasant information.
• p230 The truth is replaced by silence, and the silence is a lie.
• p238 What the therapist does for the patient, a lone voice can do for the group - if he is willing to break the hold of the group's blind spots. In his suggestions for countering groupthink, Irving Janis suggests that a group designate one member as a deviant - that is, as a critical evaluator of what goes on, raising objections and doubts. The devil's advocate can save the group from itself, making sure it faces uncomfortable facts and considers unpopular views, any of which could be crucial for a sound decision.
• p245 Should all truth be told? Probably not.
• p246 The young person in adolescent needs tangible models to follow into adulthood. The adolescent does not really want to demolish her parents; her self-esteem is linked to theirs. By destroying that ideal, the teenager does herself damage.
• p246 While if may well be true, as Franz Boas said, that "all that man can do for humanity is to further the truth, whether it be sweet or bitter," delivering that truth artfully is a delicate matter. When truth is likely to draw open the veils that keep out painful information, the dangers can be great.
• p249 Once upon a time there was a man who had no illusions about anything. ... As young man he realized that the most generous act is self-serving, the most disinterested inquiry servers interest, that lies are told by printed words. Of all those people who lose illusions he lost more than anyone else, taboo and prescription alike; and as everything became permitted nothing was left worthwhile.
• p251 Somewhere between the two poles - living a life of vital lies and speaking simple truths - there lies a skillful mean, a path to sanity and survival.

In the beginning of the year Oldřich lend me a Czech translation of a book named "Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality". Now I've reread that book in English.

It's not a book for everyone and for every day as it is a spirituality book. It has bit in common with the question books that I've read so far - Leading with Questions and Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. While those two were about business, all three share the same idea - we have to drop our rusty opinions and prejudgements in order to see and understand the reality and only then the things, people and situations begin to change and we can experience the happiness and the beauty of the life and world around us.

Underneath are the notes from the book. I've realized that for a 184 page book I took quite a lot of them. To prevent TLNR I've made the most interesting bold.

• p3 Insulting? Never. That wasn't Tony's way. But he was telling me and these people that in his eyes I was a "golden eagle", unaware of the heights to which I could soar.
• pp5 Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
• p6 Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
• p8 Don't try to teach a pig sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig.
• p10 Wouldn't that be wonderful? She would love me at the cost of her happiness and I would love her at the cost of my happiness, and so you've got two unhappy people, but long live love!
• p11 What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?
• p12 I'll explain. It didn't make sense to me for many years until I suddenly discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they get disillusioned with all relationships.
• p13 There are times when psychotherapy is a tremendous help, because when you're on the verge of going insane, raving mad, you're about to become either a psychotic or a mystic.
• p14 We're crazy to the point, I've come to believe, that if everybody agrees on something, you can be sure it's wrong!
• p15 Very well, when you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you are giving it power.
• p16 When you renounce something, you're tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. ... Understand its true value and you won't need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.
• p17 Are you listening, as most people do, in order to confirm what you already think?
• p19 There are two types of selfishness. The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. The second one is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be more refined kind of selfishness.
• p25 That's the worst kind of charity, when you're doing something so you won't get a bad feeling. You don't have guts to say you want to be left alone. ... I don't believe anyone who say that he or she does not like hurting people.
• p28 We don't want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don't want to look, because if we do, we may change.
• p29 It's not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known.
• p30 "The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wan't one bit better than they were." We differ from others - from criminals, for example - only in what we do or don't do, not in what we are.
• p31 Someone once said, "I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn't know how to get started again."
• p35 The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you.
• p37 The trouble with people is that they're busy fixing things they don't even understand. We're always fixing things, aren't we? It never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed. They really don't. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they'd change.
• p37 Because what you judge you cannot understand.
• p39 "That country of yours and its poverty - it's disgusting." I feel ashamed. But I didn't create it. What's going on? Did you ever stop to think? People tell you. "I think you're very charming," so I feel wonderful. I get a positive stroke (that's why they call it I'm O.K., you're O.K.) I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be "I'm an Ass, You're an Ass.". That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admin you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, "You're wrong" I say, "What can you expect of an ass?"
• p40 I press a button and you're up; I press another button and you're down. And you like that. How many people do you know who are unaffected by praise or blame? That isn't human, we say. Human means that you have to be a little monkey, so everyone can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing. But is that human?
• p41 If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you're O.K., you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you're not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people's expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair, whether your shoes are polished - in short, whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human?
• p42 Yet my experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
• p44 Again and again in my therapy groups I come across people who aren't there at all. Their daddy is there, their mammy is there, but they're not there.
• p51 No! The world's all right. The one who has to change is you.
• p53 We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess.
• p55 There's an emptiness inside, isn't there? And when the emptiness surfaces, what do you do? You run away, turn on the television, turn on the radio, read a book, search for human company, seek entertainment, seek distraction. Everybody does that. It's big business nowadays, an organized industry to distract us and entertain us.
• p56 You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don't change. But when you understand it, it changes.
• p59 When you're living for nothing, you've got all your skills, you've got all your energy, you're relaxed, you don't care, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
• p59 The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.
• p66 You know there are times like that when the Blessed Sacrament becomes more important then Jesus Christ. When worship becomes more important then love, when the Church becomes more important than life. When God becomes more important than the neighbour.
• p71 The dislike was still there. It hadn't gone away, but it wasn't getting in the way. What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.. When you're aware of it, you're free from it. It's there, but you're not affected by it. You're not controlled by it; you're not enslaved by it. That's the difference.
• p73 Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions.
• p74 Suffering is given to you that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality.
• p75 It's like when you throw black paint in the air; the air remains uncontaminated. You never color the air black. No matter what happens to you, you remain uncontaminated. You remain in peace. There are human beings who have attained this, what I call human. Not this nonsense of being a puppet, jerked about this way and that way, letting events or other people tell you how to feel.
• p76 He said to the plumber, "hey, you're charging me two hundred dollars an hour. I don't make this kind of money as a lawyer." The plumber said, "I didn't make that kind of money when I was a lawyer either!"
• p79 They didn't teach me how to live at school. They taught me everything else. As one man said, "I got pretty good education. It took me years to get over it."
• p80 When you bump your knee against a table, the table's fine. It's busy being what it was made to be - a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind.
• p81 But what you are really telling me is that you want to be desired. You want to be applauded, to be attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you.
• p82 How do you control a person like this? He doesn't need you; he's not threatened by your criticism; he doesn't care what you think of him or what you say about him. He's cut all those strings; he's not a puppet any longer. It's terrifying. "So we've got to get rid of him. He tells the truth; he has become fearless; he has stopped being human."
• p82 "God is not attained by a process of addition in the soul, but by a process of subtraction." You don't do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you're free.
• p88 We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.
• p90 That still leaves us with a big question: Do I do anything to change myself? I've got a big surprise for you, lots of good news! You don't have to do anything. The more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand.
• p91 "Don't glory in that award, because it's setting you up for the time when you can't perform as well."
• p92 "It was so wonderful in the old days when we did things badly and enjoyed them."
• p93 The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your pride, or your profit, or your pleasure. That is truly selfish. So I'll protect myself. I won't feel obligated to be with you; I won't feel obligated to say yes to you. It I find your company pleasant, then I'll enjoy it without clinging to it. But I no longer avid you because of any negative feelings you create in me. You don't have that power any more.
• p98 In fact, he really isn't your child and he never was. He belongs to life, not to you. No one belongs to you. What you are talking about is a child's education. If you want lunch, you better come in between twelve and one or you don't get lunch. Period. That's the way things are run here. You don't come on time you don't get lunch. You're free, that's true, but you must take the consequences.
• p100 "About God, we cannot say what He is but rather what He is not. And so we cannot speak about how He is but rather how He is not."
• p104 Did you ever try to lose something? That's right, the harder you try, the harder it gets.
• p105 So when the man comes to his senses and realizes that he is not Napoleon, he does not cease to be. He continues to be, but he suddenly realizes that he is something other than what he thought he was.
• p107 "The neurotic is a person who worries about something that did not happen in the past. He's not like us normal people who worry about things that will not happen in the future."
• p108 After enlightenment I continue to be depressed. But gradually, or rapidly, or suddenly, you get the state of wakefulness. This is the state where you drop desire. But remember what I mean by desire and cravings. I mean: "Unless I get what I desire, I refuse to be happy." I mean cases where happiness depends on the fulfilment of desire.
• p108 Do not suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless. You'd be without energy and that would be terrible. Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better. But don't suppress desire, understand it. Understand it. Don't seek to fulfil desire so much as to understand desire. And don't just renounce the objects of your desire, understand them; see them in their true light. See them for what they are really worth. Because if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at it and see it for what is is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into what I call a preference.
• p118 People talk about making love and falling in love. Like the little boy who says to the little girl, "have you ever fallen in love?" And she answers, "No, but I've fallen in like."
• p121 The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
• p122 Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Finally, if we are to believe the mystics (and it doesn't take too much of an effort to understand this, or even believe it, but no one can see it at once), reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality. That is why it is so difficult to translate from one language to another, because each language cuts reality up differently.
• p126 When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn't the intelligent wonder of mystics; it's the formless wonder of the child. Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and words and concepts. Then hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll return to wonder again.
• p126 "God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason" We don't have to quarrel about a word, because "God" is only a word, a concept. One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, about concepts, about judgements. Drop your concepts, drop your opinions, drop your prejudices, drop your judgments, and you will see that.
• p130 Flags re in the heads of people. In any case, there are thousands of words in our vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all. But they trigger emotions in us! So we begin to see things that are not there.
• p131 Now, it you want to wear your culture the way you wear your clothes, that's fine. The Indian woman would wear a sari and the American woman would wear something else, the Japanese woman would wear her kimono. But nobody identifies herself with clothes.
• p134 When we were young, we were programmed to unhappiness. They taught us that in order to be happy you need money, success, a beautiful or handsome partner in life, a good job, friendship, spirituality, God - you name it. Unless you get these things, you're not going to be happy, we were told. Now, that is what I call an attachment. An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.
• p135 "Until I get this object (money, friendship, anything) I'm not going to be happy; I've got to strive to get it and then when I've got it, I've got to strive to keep it. I get a temporary thrill. Oh, I'm so thrilled, I've got it!" But how long does that last? A few minutes, a few days at the most. When you get your brand new car, how long does the thrill last? Until your next attachment is threatened!
• p138 I was afraid to say this, but I talked to God, and I told Him that I don't need Him.
• p139 I remember how frightened I was to say to an intimate friend of mine, "I really don't need you I can be perfectly happy without you. And by telling you this I find I can enjoy your company thoroughly - no more anxieties, no more jealousies, no more possessiveness, no more clinging. It is a delight to be with you when I am enjoying you on a nonclinging basis. You're free; so am I."
• p139 I'm quite amused, sometimes, to see even seemingly objective people like therapists and spiritual directors say of someone, "He's a great guy, great guy, I really like him." I find out later that it's because he likes me that I like him. I look to myself, and I find the same thing coming up now and again: If you're attached to appreciation and praise, you're going to view people in terms of their threat to your attachment or their fostering of your attachment.
• p140 If I need you to make me happy, I've got to use you, I've got to manipulate you, I've got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free.
• p141 It's a great thing you have suffered. Only then can you get sick of it. You can make use of suffering to end suffering.
• p142 Mark Twain put it very nicely when he said, "It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have frozen to death." We do freeze to death on words. It's not the cold outside that matters, but the thermometer. It's not reality that matters, but what you're saying to yourself about it.
• p145 Did you pick up the attachment there? Peace. Her attachment to peace and calm. She was saying, "Unless I'm peaceful, I won't be happy." Did it ever occur to you that you could be happy in tension?
• p146 It sounds strange in a culture where we've been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there's nowhere to go because you're there already. The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: "The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived."
• p147 The harder you try to change, the worse it can get. Does this mean that a certain degree of passivity is all right? Yes, the more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. That's the meaning, I think, of Jesus' words: "When someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him your left as well." You always empower the demons you fight. That's very Oriental. But if you flow with the enemy, you overcome the enemy. How does one cope with evil? Not by fighting it but by understanding it. In understanding, it disappears. How does one cope with darkness? Not with one's fist. You don't chase darkness out of the room with a broom, you turn on the light. The more you fight darkness, the more real it becomes to you, and the more you exhaust yourself.
• p148 As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
• p148 I don't say that adoration isn't important, but I do say that doubt is infinitely more important than adoration.
• p150 Dying is wonderful; it's only horrible to people who have never understood life. It's only when you're afraid of life that you fear death.
• p151 "A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it." People with golden hearts would make capitalism or communism or socialism work beautifully.
• p151 I have negative feelings, so you better change in such way that I'll feel good.
• p159 There's the sotry of Paddy, who fell off the scaffolding and got a good bump. They asked, "Did the fall hurt you, Paddy?" And he said, "No, it was the stop that hurt, not the fall." When you cut water, the water doesn't get hurt; when you cut something solid, it breaks. You've got solid attitudes inside you; you've got solid illusions inside you; that's where the pain comes from.
• p159 "If the eye is unobstructed, it results in sight; if the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; if the nose is unobstructed, the result is a sense of smell; if the mouth is unobstructed, the result is a sense of taste; if the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom."
• p160 Wisdom is not something acquired; wisdom is not experience; wisdom is not applying yesterday's illusions to today's problems.
• p161 I had been thinking of another reflection, from Plato: "One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in prison."
• p162 Now this is exactly what your society did to you when you were born. You were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life - namely, work play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention.
• p163 So we were given a taste of various drug addictions: approval, attention, success, making it to the top, prestige, getting your name in the paper, power, being the boss. We were given a taste of things like being the captain of team, leading the band, etc. Having a taste for these drugs, we became addicted and began to dread losing them. Recall the lack of control you felt, the terror at the prospect of failure or of making mistake, at the prospect of criticism by others. So you became cravenly dependent on others and you lost your freedom. Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable. You crave your drugs, but as much as you hate the suffering that this involves, you find yourself completely helpless. There is never a minute when, consciusly or unconsciously, you are not aware of or attuned to the reactions of others, marching to the beat of their drums.
• p165 And we've got an inner self-conflict which animals don't have. And we're always condemning ourselves and making ourselves feel guilty.
• p170 Life is for the gambler, it really is. That's what Jesus was saying. Are you ready to risk it?
• p172 Can you imagine a life in which you refuse to enjoy or take pleasure in a single word of appreciation or to rest your head on anyone's shoulder for support? Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable any more.
• p176 Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the stars, and the rain. You don't possess these things; you surrender to them. And surrender occurs when you are aware of your illusions, when you are ware of your addictions; when you are aware of your desires and fears.
• p179 Come to Summerhill and you'll never find a handicapped child with a nickname (you know how cruel kids can be when someone stammers). You'll never find anyone needling a stammerer, never. There's no violence in those children, because no one is practising violence on them, that's why.
• p182 Do you know where wars come from? They come from projecting outside of us the conflict that is inside. Show me an individual in whom there is no inner self-conflict and I'll show you an individual in whom there is no violence. There will be effective, even hard, action in him, but no hatred. When he acts, he acts as a surgeon acts; when he acts, he acts as a loving teacher acts with mentally retarded children. You don't blame them, you understand; but you swing into action. On the other hand, when you swing into action with your own hatred and your own violence unaddressed, you've compounded the error. You've tried to put fire out with more fire. You've tried to deal with a flood by adding water to it. I repeat what Neill said: "Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad-tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil. And I am no genius, I am merely a man who refuses to guide the steps of children. I let them form their own values and the values are invariably good and social. The religion that makes people good makes people bad, but the religion known as freedom makes all people good, for it destroys the inner conflict that makes people devils."
• p184 Lots of people gain the world and lose their soul. Lots of people live empty, soulless lives because they're feeding themselves on popularity, appreciation, and praise, on "I'm O.K., you're O.K.", look at me, attend to me, support me, value me, on being the boss, on having power, on winning the race. Do you feed yourself on that?