Honoring the Self: The Pyschology of Confidence and Respect

To anyone struggling for personal happiness while being told that personal happiness is the concern of the spiritually inferior; to anyone who understands that ego and self are a height to be climbed, not an abyss to be escaped; to anyone who does not see freedom as a burden or choice and responsibility as a tragedy; to anyone who appreciates the c

Creativity does not entail “loss of self”; neither does love. If we sometimes choose to forego the ordinary pleasures of life because of passion for our work, this is an act of self-expression, not an act of self-surrender. And if we sometimes choose to forego our own convenience or pleasure for the person we love, what deadlier insult could we del

when I cease to identify exclusively with my body, my emotions, my beliefs, or my thoughts, when I realize that my ultimate “I”—my ego—is awareness itself and not the contents of awareness, I am shifting from a lower vision of self-in-the-world to a higher one. And this, in a psychological context, is precisely what transcendence always means.

Anyone who chooses to express him- or herself through some kind of productive endeavor cannot help but make a contribution to the world. That is very different, however, from the viewpoint that we are here on earth to serve.

This is not the place for a treatise on political economy. I will simply say that, today, the difficulty in discussing this issue lies in the fact that most people have all but lost the knowledge of what capitalism is, how it functions, and what it has achieved. The truth about its nature and history has been drowned in a wave of misrepresentations

In a free society, force may be used only as retaliation and only against the person or persons who initiate its use; a distinction is made between murder and self-defense. The person who resorts to the initiation of force seeks to gain a value by so doing; the person who retaliates in self-protection seeks not to gain a value, but to keep a value

The theme of self-transcendence and the dissolution of ego has begun to appear more and more prominently in Western psychology since the 1960s. The transpersonal movement was anticipated by Abraham Maslow, one of the pioneers in humanistic psychology, itself a rebellion against the overly restrictive view of human nature promulgated by proponents o

It should be recognized that a defining feature of a synergistic society is that participation in it is voluntary. If people do not choose to engage in a given cooperative activity, the implication is that they do not perceive that activity to be helpful, either for themselves or for others. Efforts to promote social cooperation within a synergisti

It has certainly never been my own view that once we acquire high self-esteem the process of individuation and development is complete. My point has rather been that the level of development with which I have been concerned cannot be bypassed—that it is the foundation for wherever the next steps of our evolution may lead us.