“I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes” – Walt Whitman
[…]“There are times,” said Somerset Maugham, “when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”
[…]“the passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority” – Paul Tillich
[…]Once a position is decided, all experience is selectively interpreted to support it.
[…]Caryl Chessman said, “There is nothing that sustains you like hate; it is better to be anything than afraid.”
[…]There is a certain security in games. They may always turn out painfully, but it is a pain that the player has learned to handle.
[…]Elton Trueblood suggests that causes for human behavior lie not only in the past but in man’s ability to contemplate the future, or estimate probabilities. “what is not, influences what is.”
[…]Someone who is enjoying a game of “Ain’t it Awful” does not welcome the intrusion of facts.
[…]A person dominated by the NOT OK “reads into” comments that which is not there.
[…]The person whose NOT OK child is always activated cannot get on with transactions which will advance his dealing with reality because he is continually concerned with unfinished business having to do with a past reality. He can’t accept a compliment gracefully because he doesn’t think he deserves it.
[…]The person who always comes on Child is really saying, “Look at me, I’m NOT OK.” The person who is always coming on Parent is really saying, “Look at you, you’re NOT OK (and that makes me feel better).”
[…]The person who always comes out “smelling like a rose” does not do so accidentally. He has a high-speed Adult.
[…]To know one’s own Child, to be sensitive to one’s own NOT OK feelings, is the first requirement for Adult data processing. Aristotle claimed that the real show of power is in restraint. The strength of the Adult shows first also in restraint – in restraining the automatic, archaic responses of Parent and Child, while waiting for the Adult to compute appropriate responses.
[…]“In the very act of giving I experience my strength, my wealth, my power…Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.” – Erich Fromm
[…]Dated, unexamined Parent data which is externalized as true is called prejudice…one cannot eliminate prejudice by an Adult discourse on the subject of prejudice. The only ways to eliminate prejudice are to uncover the fact that it is no longer dangerous to disagree with one’s parents and to update the Parent with data from today’s reality.
[…]“Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.” – Alfred North Whitehead
[…]It has been said that blaming your faults on your nature does not change the nature of your faults.
[…]“What folly,” said John Howe, ” to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.”
[…]A ritual is a socially programmed use of time where everybody agrees to do the same thing. An activity is a “common, convenient, comfortable, and utilitarian method of structuring time by a project designed to deal with the material of external reality.” A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation. Every game is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality.
[…]Games are a way of using time for people who cannot bear the stroking starvation of withdrawal and yet whose NOT OK position makes the ultimate form of relatedness, intimacy, impossible. Thus, games provide benefits to all the players. They protect the integrity of the position without the threat of uncovering the position.
[…]Games are not funny. They are defenses to protect individuals from greater or lesser degrees of pain growing from the NOT OK position. …game analysis must always be secondary to Structural and Transactional Analysis.
[…]George Sarton observed: “I believe one can divide men into two principal categories: those who suffer the tormenting desire for unity and those who do not. Between these two kinds an abyss – the ‘unitary’ is the troubled; the other is the peaceful.”
[…]The central dynamic of philosophy has been the impulse to connect. The hope has always been there, but it has not overcome the intrinsic fear of being close, of losing oneself in another, of partaking in the last of our structuring option, intimacy. A relationship of intimacy between two people may be thought of as existing independent of the first five ways of time structuring: withdrawal, pastimes, activities, rituals, and games. It is based on the acceptance by both people of the I’m OK – You’re OK position. It rests, literally, in an accepting love where defensive time structuring is made unnecessary. Intimacy is a game-free relationship, since goals are not ulterior. Intimacy is made possible in a situation where the absence of fear makes possible the fullness of perception, where beauty can be seen apart from the utility, where possessiveness is made unnecessary by the reality of possession.
[…]It is through the emancipated Adult that we can reach out to the vast areas of knowledge about our universe and about each other, explore the depths of philosophy and religion, perceive what is new, unrefracted by the old, and perhaps find answers, one at a time, to the great perplexity, “What’s the good of it all?”
[…]“We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.” – Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld
[…]The average marriage contract is made by the Child, which understands love as something you feel and not something you do, and which sees happiness as something you pursue rather than a by-product of working toward the happiness of someone other than yourself.
