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
The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.
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.
Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples...is the great spiritual challenge of our time.
To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.
We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!
In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.
The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.
You can know what's in your life when you know what's in your heart.
I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.
Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you're looking for someone who will always be 'nice' to you. Nice gets you a C+ in life. We don't always smile, talk in a soft voice, or engage in indiscriminate hugs. In the loving struggle between the sexes we thrust and parry.
We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth.
Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.