360 Posts found for Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)

James Hollis writes, “we all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.” Carl Jung termed such reflexes personal complexes — largely unconscious and emotionally charged reactions operating autonomously. Most of life’s suffering stems from the unexamined workings of these complexes and the conditioned choices they lead us to, which further sever us from our true nature.

Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Haunting this conditional life are our psychic reflexes — the coping mechanisms developed for the traumas of childhood, which James Hollis divides into two basic categories: “the experience of neglect or abandonment” or “the experience of being overwhelmed by life,” each with its particular prognosis. The overwhelmed child may become a passive and accommodating adult prone to codependence, while the abandoned child may spend a … [ Read more ]

Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Perhaps the first step in making the Middle Passage meaningful is to acknowledge the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture, and through which we have made our choices and suffered their consequences. If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens. The lens we … [ Read more ]

Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Being alive in any meaningful sense is a balance of feeling and staying safe, and taking and overcoming risks. In safety, we have a vital place to rest, be comfortable and build the foundations of a life, and through risk we are expanded and grown… It is through taking risks that we expand our safety – widening the boundaries and limitations of our existence into … [ Read more ]

Author: Ruth Allen | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Edges are, in some ways, an embodiment of the core dilemma about how to live, and how to live under the spectre of death. Boundaries say here is OK, but beyond is the insistent abyss, and I am curious about that. Limits give us a place to challenge ourselves and triumph over. They provide an opportunity for growth, where going beyond a limit can test … [ Read more ]

Author: Ruth Allen | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We cannot love whom we do not understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Trust

We are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. [Iris Murdoch defines] it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control.” … … [ Read more ]

Authors: Iris Murdoch, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

In the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

In any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

More often than not, when a person breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours.

Author: Eric Berne | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

Wanting to change is as much about our wanting, and how we describe it, as it is about the changes we want. Getting better means working out what we want to get better at.

Author: Adam Phillips | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

The profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

Author: George Saunders | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior