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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Limitation
Possibilities
Tension
Awareness
Possibility
Consciousness
Dialectical
Emerges
Limitations

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Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
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To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive - to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before
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When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.
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There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.
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The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
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There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.
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A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
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The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.
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All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
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Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
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Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
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In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the insurgents.
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We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
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We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
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The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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