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
We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
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.
There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.
The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.
We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.
We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly
Call it ""womb awe"" or even ""womb worship"" but it's not simple envy. I don't remember even wanting to be a woman. But each of the three times I have been present at the birth of one of my children, I have been overwhelmed by a sense of reverence... It was quite suddenly, the first day of creation; the Goddess giving birth to a world... Like men since the beginning of time I wondered: What can I ever create that will equal the magnificence of this new life?
I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.
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.
I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.
When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.
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.
There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.