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The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.

Sam Keen

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Sam Keen
Age: 54
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Spiritual
Involves
Away
Properly
Part
Psychological
Soul
Myth
Firsts
Illusion
Misinformed
First
Journey
Peeling
Called
Myths
Rather
Illusions

More quotes by Sam Keen

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In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.
Sam Keen
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Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth.
Sam Keen
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The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.
Sam Keen
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If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.
Sam Keen
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Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless you escape from gravity.
Sam Keen
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In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.
Sam Keen
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The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.
Sam Keen
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You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.
Sam Keen
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I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human - and the most sacred - place of all.
Sam Keen
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Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
Sam Keen
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Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.
Sam Keen
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Freud articulated the standard opinion when he asked with supposed seriousness, 'What does a woman want?'... Today the question that is the yeast in the social dough is, 'What do men want?
Sam Keen
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Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.
Sam Keen
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The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.
Sam Keen
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Our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things, which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don't mean anything.
Sam Keen
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Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.
Sam Keen
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There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.
Sam Keen
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What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Sam Keen
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A man must go on a quest / to discover the sacred fire / in the sanctuary of his own belly / to ignite the flame in his heart / to fuel the blaze in the hearth / to rekindle his ardor for the earth
Sam Keen
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Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.
Sam Keen