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Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community.
Sam Keen
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Sam Keen
Age: 54
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Better
Listening
Communion
World
Grows
Creates
Word
Speaking
Community
Worse
Story
Communication
True
Build
Stories
Conversation
Soul
Compassion
Deepens
More quotes by Sam Keen
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
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
Human beings are what I think of as biomythic animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.
Sam Keen
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
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
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Sam Keen
Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.
Sam Keen
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
You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.
Sam Keen
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
I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
Sam Keen
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
Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples...is the great spiritual challenge of our time.
Sam Keen
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
To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.
Sam Keen
If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.
Sam Keen
Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Sam Keen
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
Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.
Sam Keen
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