Personality: the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.
Personality can never develop unless the individual chooses his own way, consciously and with moral deliberation.
A man can make a moral decision to go his own way only if he holds that way to be the best. If any other way were held to be better, then he would live and develop that other personality instead of his own. The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.
The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation [the path of the inner voice] is replaced by collective necessities.
Conventions are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy.
The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable, but is no less a terrible danger for that.
[
C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.195, 198, 202
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'Has due recognition been given', Winnicott asks pointedly, 'to the need for everything to be discovered afresh by every individual analyst?'
It was a position reactive to a
Society which had, in Winnicott's view, equated development within a tradition with an uncritical compliance to the tradition.
[
Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.91
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[...] we cannot expect him always to be the
aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership.
There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all
he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.
[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.212
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[On 'modern-minded man']
His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in points of time.
Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd.
To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to general opinion.
[
Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('On Being Modern-minded'), p.78, 79
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There is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.
By that I mean that I personally do not believe in the word
style.
Why?
Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs,
unless we have another group of beings on earth that are structurally
different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.
Why is that?
Because
we have two hands and two legs. Now the unfortunate thing is that
there's boxing, which uses hands, and judo which uses throwing.
I'm not putting them down, mind you - but because of styles, people are separated. They
are not united together because styles become law.
The original
founder of the style started out with a hypothesis. But now it has
become the gospel truth, and people who go into that become the product
of it.
It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are
structured, how you are built, or how you are made...it doesn't seem to
matter. You just go in there and become that product. And that, to me,
is not right.
So styles tend to not only separate man
because they have their own doctrines, and the doctrines became the
gospel internal truth, that you cannot change, you know?
But
if you do not have style, if you just say, "Here i am, as a human
being, how can i express myself totally and completely?" - that way, you
won't create a style, because style is a crystallization, as opposed to
a internal process of continuing growth.
Man, he is
constantly growing and when he is bound by a set pattern of ideas or
way of doing things, that's when he stops growing.
[
Bruce Lee]
................................................................................................................................................................................
The YELLOW MEME thinks and acts from an inner-directed core. The
individual gyroscopes that enable the person to keep balance in a
paradoxical world spin within the principled, knowledgable self.
Such people have strong ethical anchors of their own reasoned choosing, derived from many sources but are not entrapped by rigid rules based in external dogma or mandates of authority.
[...] one develops confidence in the self-generated messages and instructions that emanate from one's core beliefs.
[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.278
................................................................................................................................................................................
So often in our lives, we act as though there were only one set of
rules. For instance, in cooking we tend to follow recipes with dutiful
precision. We add ingredients as though by official decree. If the
recipe calls for a pinch of salt and four pinches fall in, panic
strikes, as though the bowl might now explode.
Thinking
of a recipe as a rule, we often do not consider how people's tastes
vary, or what fun it might be to make up a new dish.
[
Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.16
................................................................................................................................................................................
When
you’re stuck with a set of absolutes when you’re a kid - you know, you
go to this kind of church, you do that kind of thing, and you think this
way - if you have any sense of imagination I think that you fall out
fairly quickly with absolutes; and you want to see as many avenues as
are possible in life.
And I think, for my part, I got to a place where
[…] I could pick bits and pieces of each of those avenues. Its not
essential to take one avenue as the gospel. No one man is right about
anything - or even one group of people - are not right about everything.
I would pick and choose little bits of everything; a little bit
of Buddhism maybe, a little bit of this, a little bit of that … to kind
of give me some basis, some kind of explanatory platform for my life.
And that in itself is an enjoyment.
[David Bowie]
................................................................................................................................................................................
I
looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they
were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road,
everybody for himself and with little rules of his own [...]
[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.215
................................................................................................................................................................................
I could look up creativity in
The Oxford English Dictionary,
and I could do research on all that has been written on the subject in
philosophy and psychology, and then I could serve it all up on a dish.
Even this would be garnished in such a way that you would exclaim: 'How
original!' Personally, I am unable to follow this plan.
I have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous.
But
I think you can see in this my own need to make sure I am not buried by
my theme. It would kill me to work out the concordance of creativity
references.
Evidently I must always be fighting to
feel
creative, and this has the disadvantage that if I am describing a
simple word like 'love', I must start from scratch. (Perhaps that's the
right place to start from.)
[
D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays By A Psychoanalyst ('Living Creatively'), p.41
................................................................................................................................................................................
The decisive point is not
what is thought but
how it is thought.
The
thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and
original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not
thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks,
has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world
outside or inside himself.
[
Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.167
................................................................................................................................................................................
Since
the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that
we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There
is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things
which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from
parents, phrases from phrases).
Humperson did,
however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and
misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in
later life, when he grew rather deaf.
[
Momus]
http://imomus.livejournal.com/468556.html
................................................................................................................................................................................
Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive.
Liberation
from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply
ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades for
biological survival.
Indeed, such liberation is only
possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous
state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he
has some discretion as to which of his parents' teachings he will
accept.
At certain specific moments early in his life
he decides how he is going to adapt to them. It is because his
adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be
undone, since decisions are reversible under favourable circumstances.
First
... the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has to
be lifted ... then the influence of the individual parental, societal
and cultural background has to be thrown off. The same must be done with
the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally the
advantages derived from one's immediate social circle have to be partly
or wholly sacrificed.
In essence, this whole
preparation consists of obtaining friendly divorce from one's parents
(and from other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably
visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.
[
Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.161
................................................................................................................................................................................
[...] even the individuals whose initiation into certain secrets has
marked them out in some way are fundamentally obeying the laws of group
identity, though in their case the group is a socially differentiated
one.
The secret society is an intermediary stage on the
way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective
organisation to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not
yet recognised that it is really the individual's task to differentiate
himself from all the others and stand on his own feet.
All
collective identities, such as membership in organisations, support of
"isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfilment of this task. Such
collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid,
beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally
shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the
bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned
vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a
mother providing nourishment and growth.
[
C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.375
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I don't want to go and do 'Liar' again, because I can do it very well. I can probably sing it better now than when I wrote it. You're better at it when you get old, in a way. You get grey and then you get good. But what would that say about me?
