Sam Keen
Sam Keen
Sam Keenis an American author, professor, and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, and being a man in contemporary society. He also co-produced Faces of the Enemy, an award-winning PBS documentary; was the subject of a Bill Moyers' television special in the early 1990s; and for 20 years served as a contributing editor at Psychology Today magazine. He is also featured in the 2003 documentary Flight from Death...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
Sam Keen quotes about
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.
Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.
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.
You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.
I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.
Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated.
There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.
At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn't immediately real; it was always something "out there." My deeply held illusions of immortality - a product of my very conservative religious upbringing - were still pretty much intact.
The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.
I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.
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.
To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.