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The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

Sam Keen

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Sam Keen
Age: 54
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Telling
Stories
Revolutionary

More quotes by Sam Keen

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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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There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
Sam Keen
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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
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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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It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.
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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The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology.
Sam Keen
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Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we, unaccountably, find ourselves in a somewhat intelligible world.
Sam Keen
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I think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us meaning, only material things.
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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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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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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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
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The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
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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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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What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
Sam Keen
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Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.
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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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