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All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?
The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.
We need to work on the world so it will not be so oppressive.
I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.
As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.
Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.
Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.
We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.
I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.
Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.
It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.
Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, "What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?"
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