What triggers our engagement in life? What makes us want to deepen ourselves and have a life rooted in the authentic ground of our being? As we begin to consider these questions, we may realize that we aren’t born highly …
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… Do you really know what you want?… I encounter many different people daily who are fascinating and remarkable, and I often find myself standing in awe of how unique we all are as individuals. Yet as I get …
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My new book, The Search for Self & the Search for God, is available for FREE in Kindle format June 7-11, 2016. Get it FREE Have you ever wondered how you could live with passion, purpose, clarity, and a sense …
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Erich Fromm believed that character determined behavior. In his studies of how society affects our development, he concluded that every society shares a common character structure, meaning a common set of traits that motivate us to behave in ways that fulfill the goals and ideals of our culture. For example we are taught and conditioned to believe our self-worth depends upon our achievements, our financial value, the things we own, how productive we are, and how other people evaluate us. Fromm called this collection of traits our social character. Society from its largest institutional units down to its smallest, the family, endeavors to teach us these traits.
In understanding Jung’s individuation process and how it works for us, it helps to know a few basic things about the levels of consciousness we can obtain. To begin with, our levels of consciousness or psychological maturity become increasingly based on self-awareness rather than age after we have reached adulthood.
To understand what Jung meant by a religious attitude and our emotional problems, we need to become familiar with what he calls the individuation process. While each of us grows and ages physically, whether we like it or not, the same fact isn’t true about our psychological growth. The individuation process recognizes that after we have grown to a certain point psychologically, we have to make an effort; we have to pursue self-knowledge, to mature as people and live in a satisfying manner in our relationships and culture.
Dear Readers, The following is the first of a 4-part excerpt from Chapter 1 of Sacred Selfishness, Captives of Normalcy. Captives of Normalcy For certain societies that people today like to call primitive, the dominating trait of life was …
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Have you ever thought about how strongly we have been indoctrinated into the idea: “Don’t be selfish?” When I think back about the southern culture I was raised in, I remember very clearly being told, “Don’t be selfish,” again and …
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When we paralyze ourselves with self-critical, judgmental attitudes, the life energy that is supposed to be sustaining our growth becomes regressive, stagnant, and deadly. Soon we become bonded to fear, the fear of losing what we have attained or the …
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Imagine living a life free from fear…Imagine getting past anxieties imposed by our culture…and becoming truly successful on our own genuine terms. These are the goals I suggested for us in my last blog about facing the demon of …
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