Dennis Okholm, reviewing Kathleen Noris' book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, writes,
In a society where acedia results in relationships that are recycled more often than aluminum cans, Norris insists that what is most likely to maintain a marriage is not giddy romance but discipline, martyrdom, and obedience (which, at its etymological root, refers to hearing): "The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. You may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, but it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married." Good advice in a culture where that "five-o'clock somewhere" mirage always beckons.
Books & Culture, September/October 2008, Vol. 14, No. 5, Page 10.
Saturday, November 1, 2025
Friday, October 31, 2025
How Do We Change the Culture?
How Do We Change the Culture?
Here is an interesting summary of a part of a chapter in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:
Because culture is the accumulation of tangible things, not something vague or ethereal, it can be changed only by creating some new tangible things that gain a wide enough acceptance by the public to reshape their world. Since cultures are always “full,” one has to create something new that will convince enough people to set aside some current cultural good and exchange it for the new cultural good. However, Christians often choose other less effective strategies for changing the culture. Condemning the culture usually doesn’t work since people will continue to consume the cultural goods even if we disapprove of them. Critiquing the culture doesn’t work either, merely producing more sophisticated analyses that have no effect on people’s choices of cultural goods. Copying culture doesn’t work either since it merely creates a sub-culture that consumes its goods while the larger culture ignores them. Consuming culture is also a poor strategy for change since individual consumers have a negligible effect on a global, or even national, culture. Instead, the best way to change the culture is to create new cultural goods that are better or more attractive so that the public will consume them, and thus change the culture.
Here is an interesting summary of a part of a chapter in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:
“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”
Because culture is the accumulation of tangible things, not something vague or ethereal, it can be changed only by creating some new tangible things that gain a wide enough acceptance by the public to reshape their world. Since cultures are always “full,” one has to create something new that will convince enough people to set aside some current cultural good and exchange it for the new cultural good. However, Christians often choose other less effective strategies for changing the culture. Condemning the culture usually doesn’t work since people will continue to consume the cultural goods even if we disapprove of them. Critiquing the culture doesn’t work either, merely producing more sophisticated analyses that have no effect on people’s choices of cultural goods. Copying culture doesn’t work either since it merely creates a sub-culture that consumes its goods while the larger culture ignores them. Consuming culture is also a poor strategy for change since individual consumers have a negligible effect on a global, or even national, culture. Instead, the best way to change the culture is to create new cultural goods that are better or more attractive so that the public will consume them, and thus change the culture.
Friday, July 25, 2025
Deliver Greatness Every Day
VII. Summit Seven: Deliver Greatness, Every Day
“We give others the courage to do great things by our own example of doing great things.” Steve Ackerman
A. Witnessing Greatness Every Day
1. Who in your life do you currently most admire? Why? What does that person do, or demonstrate, that makes him worthy of your admiration?
2. Who do you currently most admire at work, at school, or in your community? Why? What does that person do, or demonstrate, that makes him worthy of your admiration?
3. Summit One: Take It On
a) How does that person take it on?
b) Where does that person fall on the Adversity Continuum?
c) If you had to guess, what assumptions do you think that person makes about adversity?
4. Summit Two: Summon Your Strengths
a) What is the toughest or most important thing you’ve seen that person pursue?
b) What skills did that person possess and develop to make it happen?
c) What strengths does that person summon in the face of adversity? Which ones do you most admire?
d) How do the teams that person assembles or joins complement his or her strengths to achieve a higher goal?
e) How does that person create positive interdependence, being roped together with others?
f) What does he bring to any team? Rate that person’s overall A Factor, W Factor, E Factor.
5. Summit Three: Engage Your CORE
a) Do you think that person has a high, moderate or low Adversity Quotient?
b) To what extent does that person tend to focus on what can be influenced (C), step up to make things better (O), contain bad things (R), and see or get past adverse events (E)?
c) On a scale of one to ten, how effectively does that person engage his CORE?
6. Summit Four: Pioneer Possibilities
a) What possibilities, big or small, has that person pioneered?
b) How does that person respond when someone says something import is impossible?
c) What Signature Systems have you seen that person apply?
7. Summit Five: Pack Light, Pack Right
a) On a scale of one to ten, where does that person score on Life Worth?
b) What examples can you think of when that person has forgone a desire in order to achieve something more important?
c) How effectively does that person strategically invest time, energy, and money on the things that matter most? To what extent does that person invest in his own well-being?
8. Summit Six: Suffer Well
a) What suffering, big or small, have you seen that person endure?
b) How did that person handle it? What effect did his approach to suffering have on others?
9. How would you describe that person’s relationship with adversity? Would you have chosen that person if he had never faced any adversity or had scored much lower on the Adversity Continuum?
B. Your Everyday Greatness Plan
1. Summit One: Take It On
a) Write down how you could take on and harness the adversity in a way that not only reduces your pain or achieves your goals, but also actually elevates others in the process. What lower level behavior do you need to stop? What’s the one thing that would have the most significant impact on your life and on those around you?
2. Summit Two: Summon Your Strengths
a) How can you summon your strengths to deliver greatness? What strengths do you have that will serve you best in this challenge and what strengths do you need to develop? Who do you need with you? Who must not be with you?
3. Summit Three: Engage Your CORE
a) How can you engage your CORE in a way that is uplifting to others?
4. Summit Four: Pioneer Possibilities
a) What challenges would most people consider impossible but would change the game if you could make them possible?
5. Summit Five: Pack Light, Pack Right
a) How can you pack light, pack right to have a positive impact on those around you?
6. Summit Six: Suffer Well
a) How can you respond to suffering in a way that encourages and empowers those around you?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
“We give others the courage to do great things by our own example of doing great things.” Steve Ackerman
A. Witnessing Greatness Every Day
1. Who in your life do you currently most admire? Why? What does that person do, or demonstrate, that makes him worthy of your admiration?
2. Who do you currently most admire at work, at school, or in your community? Why? What does that person do, or demonstrate, that makes him worthy of your admiration?
3. Summit One: Take It On
a) How does that person take it on?
b) Where does that person fall on the Adversity Continuum?
c) If you had to guess, what assumptions do you think that person makes about adversity?
4. Summit Two: Summon Your Strengths
a) What is the toughest or most important thing you’ve seen that person pursue?
b) What skills did that person possess and develop to make it happen?
c) What strengths does that person summon in the face of adversity? Which ones do you most admire?
d) How do the teams that person assembles or joins complement his or her strengths to achieve a higher goal?
e) How does that person create positive interdependence, being roped together with others?
f) What does he bring to any team? Rate that person’s overall A Factor, W Factor, E Factor.
5. Summit Three: Engage Your CORE
a) Do you think that person has a high, moderate or low Adversity Quotient?
b) To what extent does that person tend to focus on what can be influenced (C), step up to make things better (O), contain bad things (R), and see or get past adverse events (E)?
c) On a scale of one to ten, how effectively does that person engage his CORE?
6. Summit Four: Pioneer Possibilities
a) What possibilities, big or small, has that person pioneered?
b) How does that person respond when someone says something import is impossible?
c) What Signature Systems have you seen that person apply?
7. Summit Five: Pack Light, Pack Right
a) On a scale of one to ten, where does that person score on Life Worth?
b) What examples can you think of when that person has forgone a desire in order to achieve something more important?
c) How effectively does that person strategically invest time, energy, and money on the things that matter most? To what extent does that person invest in his own well-being?
8. Summit Six: Suffer Well
a) What suffering, big or small, have you seen that person endure?
b) How did that person handle it? What effect did his approach to suffering have on others?
9. How would you describe that person’s relationship with adversity? Would you have chosen that person if he had never faced any adversity or had scored much lower on the Adversity Continuum?
B. Your Everyday Greatness Plan
1. Summit One: Take It On
a) Write down how you could take on and harness the adversity in a way that not only reduces your pain or achieves your goals, but also actually elevates others in the process. What lower level behavior do you need to stop? What’s the one thing that would have the most significant impact on your life and on those around you?
2. Summit Two: Summon Your Strengths
a) How can you summon your strengths to deliver greatness? What strengths do you have that will serve you best in this challenge and what strengths do you need to develop? Who do you need with you? Who must not be with you?
3. Summit Three: Engage Your CORE
a) How can you engage your CORE in a way that is uplifting to others?
4. Summit Four: Pioneer Possibilities
a) What challenges would most people consider impossible but would change the game if you could make them possible?
5. Summit Five: Pack Light, Pack Right
a) How can you pack light, pack right to have a positive impact on those around you?
6. Summit Six: Suffer Well
a) How can you respond to suffering in a way that encourages and empowers those around you?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
Suffer Well
VI. Summit Six: Suffer Well
“I cannot imagine a fate more awful--a fate worse than death—than a life lived in perfect harmony and balance.” Carl Jung
The question in life is not whether you will ever have to suffer. Rather, it is this: When you do suffer, how will you suffer? Will you suffer poorly, or will you suffer well?
Suffering can be the highest-octane fuel for greatness. You need to learn to turn suffering into meaning and beauty, elevating everyone around you.
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Helen Keller
A. Suffering Defined
1. To suffer is to endure something painful. The more something means to you the more painful it may be. The power of suffering is its ability to STRIP away superficialities, ego, and distractions.
a) S: Severity—the magnitude of the pain
b) T: Time—how long you must endure the pain
c) R: Relativity—how severe your pain is when you are compared with those around you and your situation is compared with your own past or other hardships
d) I: Importance—how much the thing for which you are suffering matters
e) P: Price—how much you may or will lose as a result of the adversity
B. Ten Common Cracks and Chasms
1. Whining
a) Whining is irritating and drives others away. Often it occurs when there is a lack of merit in the whiner. It also implies inaction; the whiner is venting instead of trying to solve the problem.
2. Complaining
a) Complaining, expressing unhappiness about something, is slightly more constructive than whining. Sometimes it is good and beneficial to express our unhappiness in order to come to grips with it and to get past it. However, when overdone, it makes us weak, drains our energy, and lessens our determination. It is also contagious.
3. Blaming
a) When you blame others you give up control, taking the problem out of your power to change it. When you blame you also miss out on a vital piece of your own development. Learn from your mistakes and then move on.
4. Identifying
a) Identifying means to become one with your suffering in a bad way. You limit your potential when you label yourself according to your suffering, robbing you of the opportunity to grow through your suffering.
5. Anesthetizing
a) Often we shut down emotionally, use drugs or alcohol, become workaholics, or other electronic devices, such as TV, video games, the internet, and the like.
6. Escaping
a) You can run from suffering, but you can’t hide from it. Procrastination is one of the most popular forms of escape. We can also become driven, engage in risky behavior, or look for other socially unacceptable means to deal with our pain.
7. Rationalizing
a) Overextended strengths can become weaknesses. We can explain away almost anything. It is healthy when it helps you make sense of your life so you can come to grips with the compromises you made that got you where you are. It is unhealthy when you reason yourself out of what is possible so we don’t take responsibility for our own choices.
8. Denying
a) Denying refuses to acknowledge the pain so we don’t have to deal with it. Our culture sets up standards for what are acceptable and unacceptable ways of dealing with pain and suffering, so be careful not to evaluate someone else’s response to suffering based on your cultural standards. Denial occurs when we fail to completely accept the full magnitude of our suffering, the resulting consequences, or the severity of the source. While denial can protect us, it also denies us the tremendous power and opportunity of our suffering.
9. Pretending
a) Pretending is acting as though what we know exists does not exist. Some pretending is good, such as smiling even when you are sad, and faking it until you make it, or putting on a good front so that others are not adversely affected by your suffering. However, if others discover your deception, it will hurt your credibility and you will lose their trust. Pretending is dangerous when it becomes a barrier between others and our suffering. It also denies others the opportunity to share in our suffering with us.
10. Whitewashing
a) This is a more subtle form of pretending where we embellish something to make it look better than it really is. Whitewashing can keep us from what is real, robbing us of the benefits suffering provides.
11. Principles to Keep in Mind
a) It is human nature to use these
b) To a point, most can be used positively and for good reasons
c) Overused, all become destructive
d) These are often used with the best of intentions
e) We all use them
f) If abused, they prevent us from suffering well
C. Types of Suffering
1. Physical Suffering
“Pain is God’s megaphone.” C. S. Lewis
2. Emotional Suffering
a) Emotional suffering gets less sympathy than physical suffering. It tends to be more contagious, one’s worries easily become the worries of another.
3. Mental Suffering
a) We suffer mentally when we can’t seem to figure out and resolve a matter of great importance. It manifests itself in conundrums, quandaries, confusion, and ignorance.
4. Spiritual Suffering
a) This is usually private and hidden and occurs when we feel adrift, faithless, purposeless, hopeless and unconnected. It often occurs when we have fallen short or done wrong in some matter of great importance.
“Suffering, cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” Mahatma Gandhi
D. Suffer Check
1. Work and Life
a) What is your single greatest cause of suffering at work?
b) What is your single greatest cause of suffering in your life?
c) On a scale of 1 to 10, rate each based on the STRIP criteria:
(1) Severity, Time, Relativity, Importance, Price
(2) Score: 5-15 (little suffering), 16-30 (noticeable discomfort), 31-45 (real pain), 46-50 (extreme suffering)
E. Positive Pessimism
1. Help alleviate some of the pain by joking about it being worse than it really is: “I’m not the nicest guy in the world, but at least I’m stupid.” “We may be on a tight budget, but at least the heating bill doubled.”
F. Bad Suffering
1. Bad suffering occurs when it makes us less instead of more; bitter rather than better. When we become meaner, smaller, or more selfish as a result of our pain, that is bad suffering. Suffering can be the ultimate excuse to stop trying. It is dangerous because no one will blame you if you quit. Suffering badly can also become a cultural norm. Suffering poorly is your right, but suffering well is your opportunity.
G. Good Suffering
1. Good suffering is elevating. It happens when we allow suffering to make us better people because of what we’ve been through. Good suffering can help strip you of all that is not essential. It can sweep you clean of pettiness, making you more magnanimous and selfless. It can also spawn hope in others, giving them the courage they need to persevere through their difficulties.
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” Aristotle
2. How to Suffer Well:
a) Use suffering to help and enrich others
b) Use it to become a better person by demonstrating your highest character and virtue in the face of pain
c) Turn inward and privately harness it to expand your capacity for hardship
d) Use and transcend it by attacking life with renewed determination
e) Be human and acknowledge when it’s hard or it hurts, refusing to pretend it does not exist, robbing yourself of the potential lessons
f) Ask for help when you need it
g) Turn your suffering into a cause
h) Be open about it, letting others learn from what you are going through
3. The Suffer Well
a) How?
(1) How am I going to elevate myself and others, starting now?
b) Who?
(1) Who is most affected by how I suffer?
c) What?
(1) What is my CORE with regard to your suffering? (Control, Ownership, Reach, Endurance)
d) Why?
(1) Why do I want to suffer well?
e) When?
(1) By when will I have said or done something that demonstrates my commitment to suffer well?
4. The Suffer Shifter
a) The one area in which I currently suffer the most is:
b) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to stop doing or do less of is:
c) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to start doing more of is:
d) As a result of these commitments, I and the people around me should enjoy the following benefits:
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
“I cannot imagine a fate more awful--a fate worse than death—than a life lived in perfect harmony and balance.” Carl Jung
The question in life is not whether you will ever have to suffer. Rather, it is this: When you do suffer, how will you suffer? Will you suffer poorly, or will you suffer well?
Suffering can be the highest-octane fuel for greatness. You need to learn to turn suffering into meaning and beauty, elevating everyone around you.
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Helen Keller
A. Suffering Defined
1. To suffer is to endure something painful. The more something means to you the more painful it may be. The power of suffering is its ability to STRIP away superficialities, ego, and distractions.
a) S: Severity—the magnitude of the pain
b) T: Time—how long you must endure the pain
c) R: Relativity—how severe your pain is when you are compared with those around you and your situation is compared with your own past or other hardships
d) I: Importance—how much the thing for which you are suffering matters
e) P: Price—how much you may or will lose as a result of the adversity
B. Ten Common Cracks and Chasms
1. Whining
a) Whining is irritating and drives others away. Often it occurs when there is a lack of merit in the whiner. It also implies inaction; the whiner is venting instead of trying to solve the problem.
2. Complaining
a) Complaining, expressing unhappiness about something, is slightly more constructive than whining. Sometimes it is good and beneficial to express our unhappiness in order to come to grips with it and to get past it. However, when overdone, it makes us weak, drains our energy, and lessens our determination. It is also contagious.
3. Blaming
a) When you blame others you give up control, taking the problem out of your power to change it. When you blame you also miss out on a vital piece of your own development. Learn from your mistakes and then move on.
4. Identifying
a) Identifying means to become one with your suffering in a bad way. You limit your potential when you label yourself according to your suffering, robbing you of the opportunity to grow through your suffering.
5. Anesthetizing
a) Often we shut down emotionally, use drugs or alcohol, become workaholics, or other electronic devices, such as TV, video games, the internet, and the like.
6. Escaping
a) You can run from suffering, but you can’t hide from it. Procrastination is one of the most popular forms of escape. We can also become driven, engage in risky behavior, or look for other socially unacceptable means to deal with our pain.
7. Rationalizing
a) Overextended strengths can become weaknesses. We can explain away almost anything. It is healthy when it helps you make sense of your life so you can come to grips with the compromises you made that got you where you are. It is unhealthy when you reason yourself out of what is possible so we don’t take responsibility for our own choices.
8. Denying
a) Denying refuses to acknowledge the pain so we don’t have to deal with it. Our culture sets up standards for what are acceptable and unacceptable ways of dealing with pain and suffering, so be careful not to evaluate someone else’s response to suffering based on your cultural standards. Denial occurs when we fail to completely accept the full magnitude of our suffering, the resulting consequences, or the severity of the source. While denial can protect us, it also denies us the tremendous power and opportunity of our suffering.
9. Pretending
a) Pretending is acting as though what we know exists does not exist. Some pretending is good, such as smiling even when you are sad, and faking it until you make it, or putting on a good front so that others are not adversely affected by your suffering. However, if others discover your deception, it will hurt your credibility and you will lose their trust. Pretending is dangerous when it becomes a barrier between others and our suffering. It also denies others the opportunity to share in our suffering with us.
10. Whitewashing
a) This is a more subtle form of pretending where we embellish something to make it look better than it really is. Whitewashing can keep us from what is real, robbing us of the benefits suffering provides.
11. Principles to Keep in Mind
a) It is human nature to use these
b) To a point, most can be used positively and for good reasons
c) Overused, all become destructive
d) These are often used with the best of intentions
e) We all use them
f) If abused, they prevent us from suffering well
C. Types of Suffering
1. Physical Suffering
“Pain is God’s megaphone.” C. S. Lewis
2. Emotional Suffering
a) Emotional suffering gets less sympathy than physical suffering. It tends to be more contagious, one’s worries easily become the worries of another.
3. Mental Suffering
a) We suffer mentally when we can’t seem to figure out and resolve a matter of great importance. It manifests itself in conundrums, quandaries, confusion, and ignorance.
4. Spiritual Suffering
a) This is usually private and hidden and occurs when we feel adrift, faithless, purposeless, hopeless and unconnected. It often occurs when we have fallen short or done wrong in some matter of great importance.
“Suffering, cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” Mahatma Gandhi
D. Suffer Check
1. Work and Life
a) What is your single greatest cause of suffering at work?
b) What is your single greatest cause of suffering in your life?
c) On a scale of 1 to 10, rate each based on the STRIP criteria:
(1) Severity, Time, Relativity, Importance, Price
(2) Score: 5-15 (little suffering), 16-30 (noticeable discomfort), 31-45 (real pain), 46-50 (extreme suffering)
E. Positive Pessimism
1. Help alleviate some of the pain by joking about it being worse than it really is: “I’m not the nicest guy in the world, but at least I’m stupid.” “We may be on a tight budget, but at least the heating bill doubled.”
F. Bad Suffering
1. Bad suffering occurs when it makes us less instead of more; bitter rather than better. When we become meaner, smaller, or more selfish as a result of our pain, that is bad suffering. Suffering can be the ultimate excuse to stop trying. It is dangerous because no one will blame you if you quit. Suffering badly can also become a cultural norm. Suffering poorly is your right, but suffering well is your opportunity.
G. Good Suffering
1. Good suffering is elevating. It happens when we allow suffering to make us better people because of what we’ve been through. Good suffering can help strip you of all that is not essential. It can sweep you clean of pettiness, making you more magnanimous and selfless. It can also spawn hope in others, giving them the courage they need to persevere through their difficulties.
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” Aristotle
2. How to Suffer Well:
a) Use suffering to help and enrich others
b) Use it to become a better person by demonstrating your highest character and virtue in the face of pain
c) Turn inward and privately harness it to expand your capacity for hardship
d) Use and transcend it by attacking life with renewed determination
e) Be human and acknowledge when it’s hard or it hurts, refusing to pretend it does not exist, robbing yourself of the potential lessons
f) Ask for help when you need it
g) Turn your suffering into a cause
h) Be open about it, letting others learn from what you are going through
3. The Suffer Well
a) How?
(1) How am I going to elevate myself and others, starting now?
b) Who?
(1) Who is most affected by how I suffer?
c) What?
(1) What is my CORE with regard to your suffering? (Control, Ownership, Reach, Endurance)
d) Why?
(1) Why do I want to suffer well?
e) When?
(1) By when will I have said or done something that demonstrates my commitment to suffer well?
4. The Suffer Shifter
a) The one area in which I currently suffer the most is:
b) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to stop doing or do less of is:
c) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to start doing more of is:
d) As a result of these commitments, I and the people around me should enjoy the following benefits:
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
Pack Light, Pack Right
V. Summit Five: Pack Light, Pack Right
“It’s tough to climb a mountain if you pack too much or if pack incorrectly. Likewise, it’s tough to be agile and effective at harnessing numerous adversities each day if you’re weighed down by all the competing priorities vying for your focus. When this happens, everyday distractions bury the potential for everyday greatness.”
A. Packing Right
1. Stuff
“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.” Eric Hoffer
“Everyday greatness means rising above mediocrity, even then the gravitational pull is enormous. It means moving forward and up, when everyone else is camping. Sometimes it can even mean escaping comfort and welcoming adversity.”
a) Why More Has Become Less
(1) More stuff leads to more complexity, which leads to less time, less peace of mind, and less capacity to take on more important challenges.
(2) Often, the more we add the weaker we become.
b) Which Stuff is the Right Stuff?
(1) What is mission-critical for your life?
(2) The right stuff is the stuff that most enables and least hinders your efforts to deliver your own version of everyday greatness--to do the things you are meant to do in life.
c) How Much is Enough?
(1) Since most of us live well beyond “need” and well within “want” most of what we have is unnecessary.
(2) Pleasures are not evil, but if they detract from your higher calling, or worse yet, become your calling, you have a problem.
(3) Your desires should enable you to achieve your highest efforts. If they don’t, then they must be cut out.
(4) How much is enough? Exactly as much as it takes todo the thing you have been created and called to do.
d) Net Worth vs. Life Worth
“The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thereau
(1) Net Worth
(a) Net Worth is what is left when you subtract everything you owe from everything you have.
(2) Life Worth
(a) Life Worth is the value you get from and give to life. It includes the stuff you give to life (love, energy, charity, thoughtfulness, kindness, etc.) and the stuff you get as a result (fulfillment, peace, contentment, etc.). What is your life worth?
(3) Net Worth-Life Worth Grid
(a) Step One
(i) Put an X at the spot that represents the balance you are striving for.
(b) Step Two
(i) Put a dot at the spot that indicates where you are right now
(c) Step Three
(i) Draw an arrow indicating the direction you are moving
(d) Consider Your Grid
(i) What’s the ideal combination of net worth and Life Worth? Most chose more Life Worth than net worth, and some choose the maximum of both. Very few chose more net worth over Life Worth.
(ii) How happy are you with your current balance of net worth and Life Worth? How close is it to where you want to be at this stage in your life? Do you let the pursuit of comfort get in the way of your higher cause?
(e) The Role of Adversity in Life Worth
(i) Adversity forces you to make tough choices between net worth and Life Worth.
(f) Repacking for Life Worth
(i) Take some time to spring clean your life and get rid of what you don’t need and add what you do need. Consider keeping, or adding, things that enhance the three A’s: Agility, Alchemy, and Adversity. If something hinders your capacity and weighs you down, get rid of it.
(g) Pack Check: Stuff
(i) Evaluate everything in your life and find at least five things that you can eliminate from your life to lighten your load, improve your agility and increase your energy. Ask these questions: Does my stuff…
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Makes me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(ii) What is one significant change I can make in how I use my money that will most directly fund my Life Worth?
(iii) What is one challenge or adversity I will confront to lighten my burden and increase my Life Worth?
(iv) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about stuff is…?
2. Time
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard
a) Just as indifference is the enemy of passion, worthless time is the enemy of achieving everyday greatness, and it is the demon of any enterprise. What things in your life are stealing your time and keeping you from achieving the most important thing in your life? Spend time and relentlessly evaluate all the time wasters you engage in and cut them out of your life.
b) The Time Challenge
(1) Level One Challenge: The Basics
(a) Which items on your calendar are critical? Why?
(b) Which items on your calendar are least enriching? Why?
(c) What are two or three things you could shed from your week that would substantially increase your Life Worth?
(2) Level Two Challenge: Advanced
(a) On a blank sheet of paper list all of your roles in life on the left-hand side (father, son, brother, boss, employee, coworker, student, etc.)
(b) Next to each role list one thing you have on your calendar for the next week that will most enhance your Life Worth in that role.
(c) List one challenge or adversity you would like to take on in each role to become more effective in that role.
(d) List one simple thing next to each role that you will commit to do over the coming week that will enhance your Life Worth.
(3) Pack Check: Time
(a) Evaluate everything in your schedule and eliminate those that diminish your agility and sap your energy. Ask these questions: Do my obligations…
(i) Hurt or help my agility?
(ii) Sap or fuel my energy?
(iii) Make me worse or better?
(iv) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(b) What is one significant change I can make in how I use my time that will most directly fund my Life Worth?
(c) What is one challenge or adversity I will confront to lighten my burden and increase my Life Worth?
(d) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about my use of time is…?
3. Work
“I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.” Rita Mae Brown
a) Prime Time—The Human Energy Grid
(1) What are the prime energy years of a contributing person’s life? Age 25-55
(2) What are the prime energy hours of a contributing person’s day? 7 am to 3 pm
(3) What are the prime energy days of a contributing person’s week? Monday through Thursday
b) Elevating the Day Job
(1) The first way is to infuse your present job with more Life Worth. Find ways to give your best in ways that add value to the lives of others.
c) From Paycheck to Reality Check
(1) The second way is to choose a job that adds to your Life Worth by allowing you to do something that is deeply important and adds value to other people.
d) Pack Check: Work
(1) What adjustments could you make at work to enhance your Life Worth, lighten your load, improve your agility, and increase your energy?
(2) On a scale of one to ten, to what extent does your current work affect your agility, energy, and ability to achieve everyday greatness?
(3) Ask these questions: Does my current work…
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Make me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(4) What is one significant change I can make in my work that will most directly improve my Life Worth?
(5) What is one challenge or adversity I will add to my work to increase my Life Worth?
(6) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about my work is…?
4. Self
“Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of, —a blessing that money can’t buy.” Izaak Walton
a) How far can you go in life if you are exhausted, out of shape, spiritually empty, and emotionally spent? You need to take time to invest in yourself and achieve your best so you can give your best to others. Schedule time into your life to refuel and rejuvenate so you can elevate your life to a higher level.
b) Pack Check: Self
(1) What adjustments could you make in the way you treat yourself to enhance your Life Worth, lighten your load, improve your agility, and increase your energy?
(2) On a scale of one to ten, to what extent does the way you treat yourself affect your agility, energy, and ability to achieve everyday greatness?
(3) Ask these questions: Does the way I treat myself …
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Make me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(4) What is one significant change I can make in the way I treat myself that will most directly improve my Life Worth?
(5) What is one challenge or adversity I will add to my week to refuel and increase my Life Worth?
(6) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about how to treat myself is…?
c) Life is too short and too precious to load it down with anything or anyone who depletes our potential to become and do our best. It is my moral obligation to myself as honed as possible so I can have the greatest impact on the areas that truly matter the most, including helping others increase their Life Worth.
B. The Adversity Advantage Packing List
1. Stuff
a) What item or items could you purchase or add that would improve your three A’s?
2. Time
a) What is a new obligation or something to add to your schedule that would improve your three A’s?
3. Work
a) What will you add to your work to make it richer in Life Worth?
4. Self
a) What will you add to your life to optimize your energy, your outlook, and the three A’s?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
“It’s tough to climb a mountain if you pack too much or if pack incorrectly. Likewise, it’s tough to be agile and effective at harnessing numerous adversities each day if you’re weighed down by all the competing priorities vying for your focus. When this happens, everyday distractions bury the potential for everyday greatness.”
A. Packing Right
1. Stuff
“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.” Eric Hoffer
“Everyday greatness means rising above mediocrity, even then the gravitational pull is enormous. It means moving forward and up, when everyone else is camping. Sometimes it can even mean escaping comfort and welcoming adversity.”
a) Why More Has Become Less
(1) More stuff leads to more complexity, which leads to less time, less peace of mind, and less capacity to take on more important challenges.
(2) Often, the more we add the weaker we become.
b) Which Stuff is the Right Stuff?
(1) What is mission-critical for your life?
(2) The right stuff is the stuff that most enables and least hinders your efforts to deliver your own version of everyday greatness--to do the things you are meant to do in life.
c) How Much is Enough?
(1) Since most of us live well beyond “need” and well within “want” most of what we have is unnecessary.
(2) Pleasures are not evil, but if they detract from your higher calling, or worse yet, become your calling, you have a problem.
(3) Your desires should enable you to achieve your highest efforts. If they don’t, then they must be cut out.
(4) How much is enough? Exactly as much as it takes todo the thing you have been created and called to do.
d) Net Worth vs. Life Worth
“The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thereau
(1) Net Worth
(a) Net Worth is what is left when you subtract everything you owe from everything you have.
(2) Life Worth
(a) Life Worth is the value you get from and give to life. It includes the stuff you give to life (love, energy, charity, thoughtfulness, kindness, etc.) and the stuff you get as a result (fulfillment, peace, contentment, etc.). What is your life worth?
(3) Net Worth-Life Worth Grid
(a) Step One
(i) Put an X at the spot that represents the balance you are striving for.
(b) Step Two
(i) Put a dot at the spot that indicates where you are right now
(c) Step Three
(i) Draw an arrow indicating the direction you are moving
(d) Consider Your Grid
(i) What’s the ideal combination of net worth and Life Worth? Most chose more Life Worth than net worth, and some choose the maximum of both. Very few chose more net worth over Life Worth.
(ii) How happy are you with your current balance of net worth and Life Worth? How close is it to where you want to be at this stage in your life? Do you let the pursuit of comfort get in the way of your higher cause?
(e) The Role of Adversity in Life Worth
(i) Adversity forces you to make tough choices between net worth and Life Worth.
(f) Repacking for Life Worth
(i) Take some time to spring clean your life and get rid of what you don’t need and add what you do need. Consider keeping, or adding, things that enhance the three A’s: Agility, Alchemy, and Adversity. If something hinders your capacity and weighs you down, get rid of it.
(g) Pack Check: Stuff
(i) Evaluate everything in your life and find at least five things that you can eliminate from your life to lighten your load, improve your agility and increase your energy. Ask these questions: Does my stuff…
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Makes me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(ii) What is one significant change I can make in how I use my money that will most directly fund my Life Worth?
(iii) What is one challenge or adversity I will confront to lighten my burden and increase my Life Worth?
(iv) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about stuff is…?
2. Time
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard
a) Just as indifference is the enemy of passion, worthless time is the enemy of achieving everyday greatness, and it is the demon of any enterprise. What things in your life are stealing your time and keeping you from achieving the most important thing in your life? Spend time and relentlessly evaluate all the time wasters you engage in and cut them out of your life.
b) The Time Challenge
(1) Level One Challenge: The Basics
(a) Which items on your calendar are critical? Why?
(b) Which items on your calendar are least enriching? Why?
(c) What are two or three things you could shed from your week that would substantially increase your Life Worth?
(2) Level Two Challenge: Advanced
(a) On a blank sheet of paper list all of your roles in life on the left-hand side (father, son, brother, boss, employee, coworker, student, etc.)
(b) Next to each role list one thing you have on your calendar for the next week that will most enhance your Life Worth in that role.
(c) List one challenge or adversity you would like to take on in each role to become more effective in that role.
(d) List one simple thing next to each role that you will commit to do over the coming week that will enhance your Life Worth.
(3) Pack Check: Time
(a) Evaluate everything in your schedule and eliminate those that diminish your agility and sap your energy. Ask these questions: Do my obligations…
(i) Hurt or help my agility?
(ii) Sap or fuel my energy?
(iii) Make me worse or better?
(iv) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(b) What is one significant change I can make in how I use my time that will most directly fund my Life Worth?
(c) What is one challenge or adversity I will confront to lighten my burden and increase my Life Worth?
(d) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about my use of time is…?
3. Work
“I believe you are your work. Don’t trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That’s a rotten bargain.” Rita Mae Brown
a) Prime Time—The Human Energy Grid
(1) What are the prime energy years of a contributing person’s life? Age 25-55
(2) What are the prime energy hours of a contributing person’s day? 7 am to 3 pm
(3) What are the prime energy days of a contributing person’s week? Monday through Thursday
b) Elevating the Day Job
(1) The first way is to infuse your present job with more Life Worth. Find ways to give your best in ways that add value to the lives of others.
c) From Paycheck to Reality Check
(1) The second way is to choose a job that adds to your Life Worth by allowing you to do something that is deeply important and adds value to other people.
d) Pack Check: Work
(1) What adjustments could you make at work to enhance your Life Worth, lighten your load, improve your agility, and increase your energy?
(2) On a scale of one to ten, to what extent does your current work affect your agility, energy, and ability to achieve everyday greatness?
(3) Ask these questions: Does my current work…
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Make me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(4) What is one significant change I can make in my work that will most directly improve my Life Worth?
(5) What is one challenge or adversity I will add to my work to increase my Life Worth?
(6) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about my work is…?
4. Self
“Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of, —a blessing that money can’t buy.” Izaak Walton
a) How far can you go in life if you are exhausted, out of shape, spiritually empty, and emotionally spent? You need to take time to invest in yourself and achieve your best so you can give your best to others. Schedule time into your life to refuel and rejuvenate so you can elevate your life to a higher level.
b) Pack Check: Self
(1) What adjustments could you make in the way you treat yourself to enhance your Life Worth, lighten your load, improve your agility, and increase your energy?
(2) On a scale of one to ten, to what extent does the way you treat yourself affect your agility, energy, and ability to achieve everyday greatness?
(3) Ask these questions: Does the way I treat myself …
(a) Hurt or help my agility?
(b) Sap or fuel my energy?
(c) Make me worse or better?
(d) Suffocate or maximize my Life Worth?
(4) What is one significant change I can make in the way I treat myself that will most directly improve my Life Worth?
(5) What is one challenge or adversity I will add to my week to refuel and increase my Life Worth?
(6) So far, the most important lesson I’ve learned about how to treat myself is…?
c) Life is too short and too precious to load it down with anything or anyone who depletes our potential to become and do our best. It is my moral obligation to myself as honed as possible so I can have the greatest impact on the areas that truly matter the most, including helping others increase their Life Worth.
B. The Adversity Advantage Packing List
1. Stuff
a) What item or items could you purchase or add that would improve your three A’s?
2. Time
a) What is a new obligation or something to add to your schedule that would improve your three A’s?
3. Work
a) What will you add to your work to make it richer in Life Worth?
4. Self
a) What will you add to your life to optimize your energy, your outlook, and the three A’s?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
Pioneering Possibilities
IV. Summit Four: Pioneer Possibilities
A. That’s Impossible
1. Thank people for being caring enough to look out for your best interests.
2. But then ask, “What if…? What if the thing you’ve always dreamed of doing is possible? How would it feel to be the one who made it happen? What if, by making the impossible possible, you opened a whole new world of opportunities for yourself, your organization, and the people around you?”
3. The first step to greatness is to select an adversity-rich, worthy challenge that will stretch you in new ways and represent new possibilities, if achieved.
4. The second step is to create a plan and engineer the systems that will be the key to helping you get there.
5. The third step is to practice to perfect so you can make those systems work when they count the most.
B. What is Pioneering?
1. Do you spend most of your time doing the tried and true or do you continually invent new ways of getting things done?
2. Plate: “The true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention.”
3. Three Steps of Pioneering:
a) Pick a worthy goal
b) Devise signature systems
c) Practice to perfect
C. Pick a Worthy Goal
1. Ask: What if I could do something that has never been done before?
2. Factors to consider:
a) Motivation: Why do you want to do it? Tie it to a higher, grander purpose.
b) Strengths: (Will + Skill = Strengths) To what extent would this goal leverage existing strengths or require the forging of new ones? Do you have the will necessary to achieve this goal?
c) Excitement: How excited does this goal make you?
D. Devise Signature Systems
1. You may need to invent new ways of doing things that are customized to your needs and situation. These solutions become uniquely yours.
2. “If necessity is the mother of invention, then adversity is the parent of our possibilities.”
3. The best solutions are PROPS:
a) Portable: you can take them from place to place.
b) Replicable or Repeatable: they can be readily rebuilt, reused or repeated.
c) Original: they tend to be clever and unique.
d) Personal: they fit and are adapted to you, your unique style and needs.
e) Simple: they require a minimum of steps, hassles, and resources.
E. Practice to Perfect
1. Adapt, revise and improve the systems until they are perfected. Don’t get discouraged but keep at it. Most ingenious systems are the result of tenacity, relentlessness and perseverance, not genius or brilliance.
2. Questions to ask:
a) What are the criteria for an effective Signature System or solution?
b) Where and how can you practice with the new system?
c) What will you try first?
d) How will you refine your solution?
e) Where or how else might you try it?
f) Who can give you helpful feedback?
g) When or how soon can you begin?
h) How long do you need to figure it out?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
A. That’s Impossible
1. Thank people for being caring enough to look out for your best interests.
2. But then ask, “What if…? What if the thing you’ve always dreamed of doing is possible? How would it feel to be the one who made it happen? What if, by making the impossible possible, you opened a whole new world of opportunities for yourself, your organization, and the people around you?”
3. The first step to greatness is to select an adversity-rich, worthy challenge that will stretch you in new ways and represent new possibilities, if achieved.
4. The second step is to create a plan and engineer the systems that will be the key to helping you get there.
5. The third step is to practice to perfect so you can make those systems work when they count the most.
B. What is Pioneering?
1. Do you spend most of your time doing the tried and true or do you continually invent new ways of getting things done?
2. Plate: “The true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention.”
3. Three Steps of Pioneering:
a) Pick a worthy goal
b) Devise signature systems
c) Practice to perfect
C. Pick a Worthy Goal
1. Ask: What if I could do something that has never been done before?
2. Factors to consider:
a) Motivation: Why do you want to do it? Tie it to a higher, grander purpose.
b) Strengths: (Will + Skill = Strengths) To what extent would this goal leverage existing strengths or require the forging of new ones? Do you have the will necessary to achieve this goal?
c) Excitement: How excited does this goal make you?
D. Devise Signature Systems
1. You may need to invent new ways of doing things that are customized to your needs and situation. These solutions become uniquely yours.
2. “If necessity is the mother of invention, then adversity is the parent of our possibilities.”
3. The best solutions are PROPS:
a) Portable: you can take them from place to place.
b) Replicable or Repeatable: they can be readily rebuilt, reused or repeated.
c) Original: they tend to be clever and unique.
d) Personal: they fit and are adapted to you, your unique style and needs.
e) Simple: they require a minimum of steps, hassles, and resources.
E. Practice to Perfect
1. Adapt, revise and improve the systems until they are perfected. Don’t get discouraged but keep at it. Most ingenious systems are the result of tenacity, relentlessness and perseverance, not genius or brilliance.
2. Questions to ask:
a) What are the criteria for an effective Signature System or solution?
b) Where and how can you practice with the new system?
c) What will you try first?
d) How will you refine your solution?
e) Where or how else might you try it?
f) Who can give you helpful feedback?
g) When or how soon can you begin?
h) How long do you need to figure it out?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
Engage Your CORE
III. Summit Three: Engage Your CORE
“There is a mechanism or switch,, deep within you, which can be triggered whenever any type of adversity strikes. Engaging your CORE is about rewiring your response to adversity by using a new set of tools so you can take advantage of the hardships that accompany anything big and worthwhile.”
“Your CORE is derived from your Adversity Quotient (AQ), which is a measure of how you respond to adversity of all kinds—how you respond to the world around you. It predicts and drives a host of factors that are critical to success. High AQ people rise to the top and tend to outperform, outlast, outmaneuver, and outdo their low-AQ counterparts, in essentially all endeavors.”
A. Factors critical to success:
1. Performance
2. Resilience
3. Engagement
4. Innovation
5. Attitude, morale, outlook
6. Energy
7. Problem solving
8. Health
9. Entrepreneurism
10. Agility
11. Longevity
B. Standing Up to Adversity
1. Your Adversity “Posture” is ten percent genetic and ninety percent learned.
2. By age 12 your AQ Posture is highly formed and by age 16 it is hardwired for the rest of your life
3. You must become aware of it and choose to change it
C. Using AQ: Know Your CORE
1. C: Control
a) Control is often abused by authority figures.
b) In contrast, the Serenity Prayer shows that there are things that we can control and things we can’t.
c) The aspect of control that matters the most is Influence. The most important question is not whether you are in complete control but when adversity strikes, to what extent do you perceive that you can influence whatever happens next?
d) Control is the most robust in predicting health and longevity. Those who perceive they have more control over how they do what they do tend to live nearly a full decade longer than those who accept their lot in life.
e) Engage your CORE by asking, “What facets of this situation or adversity can I potentially influence?”
2. O: Ownership
a) Ask, “How likely are you to step up to do anything to improve the situation, regardless of your job description?”
b) Don’t waste energy trying to pinpoint blame or shoulder all the responsibility yourself.
c) Do something, no matter how small, to make things better.
d) Usually you need to step up and take ownership when you least feel like doing it.
e) Engage your CORE by asking, “What can I do to affect this situation r adversity immediately and positively?”
f) Don’t give away your power or momentum by waiting for others but focus on your realm, your ownership, and then watch others do the same.
3. R: Reach
a) How does one adversity affect other areas of your life? Many engage in catastrophizing, or allowing one thing that goes wrong to spill over into other areas. Seeing a setback as devastating will stop you, but seeing it as merely one small setback will give you the ability to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward.
b) The better you are at containing difficulties the lighter you feel and the more effective you will be. The bigger and worse everything appears the more suffocating life becomes, making it difficult to keep your footing.
c) Engage your CORE to limit the size, scope, and fallout of your adversities by asking, “What can I do to minimize or contain the downside of this situation?” and “What can I do to optimize the potential upside of this situation?”
d) Dreamy optimists are dangerous but engaged optimists are hopeful that their relentless, strategically focused efforts will increase the chance that things will turn out better over time.
e) The FAILURE FANTASY: Visualize in vivid detail the pain and agony that will result if you allow yourself to fail. This will motivate you to endure and not give up.
D. Building your CORE
1. The best way to build your CORE is through heightened awareness, with feedback from multiple sources.
2. The CORE Panorama
a) On a scale of one to ten, how effectively do I respond to adversity?
b) Am I more effective with certain kinds of adversities than others? If so, which one am I better or worse at? Am I better at dealing with big adversities or the small, day-to-day stuff?
c) Are there certain times when I deal better with adversity than others? If so, when? What have I observed?
d) What is the most positive or negative example of how I dealt with adversity?
e) If I drew a line or continuum ranging from “helpless” to “in control” where would I typically fall when adversity strikes?
f) When the tough stuff hits, how likely am I to step up to do even the smallest thing to make the situation better?
g) How well do you think I do at keeping the adversity in its place? Do I contain the adversity or do I tend to let it spill over into everything else?
h) How long do I tend to let adversities last?
i) What do I like best about the way I handle adversity? What do I like least? Why?
j) What would be an example of a time when I have done what I just described?
k) If I were coaching me on how to handle adversity more effectively, what is the one thing I’d like me to do more, less, or differently?
3. Consider Your CORE
a) When adversity strikes, make it a habit to ask, “What’s my CORE?”
b) How much Control am I feeling or indicating?
c) To what extent am I taking Ownership and stepping up to tackle this situation?
d) How far am I willing to let this Reach? How big am I letting it become?
e) How long do I see this Enduring? To what extent am I letting this drag on?
4. Recognizing CORE
a) Analyze other people’s situations to find instances of CORE or its absence.
5. Employ the CORE Strategy
a) Control
(1) What is everything beyond our control? What things do most people consider out of our control?
(2) Of those things listed, which ones are absolutely beyond our influence? Which ones can we influence, even in some small way?
(3) Of the things we could potentially influence in this situation, which two are the most important?
b) Ownership
(1) Where and how can we step up to make the most immediate positive difference in this situation?
c) Reach
(1) What is the worst thing that could happen?
(2) If we allowed ourselves to think outrageously, what is the best thing that could happen?
(3) What things can we do to minimize the potential downside of this situation?
(4) What things can we do to maximize the potential upside of this situation?
d) Endurance
(1) What do we want life to look like on the other side of this adversity?
(2) What else can we do to get there as quickly and completely as possible?
e) The Action Funnel
(1) Which actions first?
(2) By when?
(3) How will I do it?
(4) What is the most likely obstacle?
(5) How will I deal with it?
(6) If the first action fails or falls short, then what?
(7) By when?
(8) How?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
“There is a mechanism or switch,, deep within you, which can be triggered whenever any type of adversity strikes. Engaging your CORE is about rewiring your response to adversity by using a new set of tools so you can take advantage of the hardships that accompany anything big and worthwhile.”
“Your CORE is derived from your Adversity Quotient (AQ), which is a measure of how you respond to adversity of all kinds—how you respond to the world around you. It predicts and drives a host of factors that are critical to success. High AQ people rise to the top and tend to outperform, outlast, outmaneuver, and outdo their low-AQ counterparts, in essentially all endeavors.”
A. Factors critical to success:
1. Performance
2. Resilience
3. Engagement
4. Innovation
5. Attitude, morale, outlook
6. Energy
7. Problem solving
8. Health
9. Entrepreneurism
10. Agility
11. Longevity
B. Standing Up to Adversity
1. Your Adversity “Posture” is ten percent genetic and ninety percent learned.
2. By age 12 your AQ Posture is highly formed and by age 16 it is hardwired for the rest of your life
3. You must become aware of it and choose to change it
C. Using AQ: Know Your CORE
1. C: Control
a) Control is often abused by authority figures.
b) In contrast, the Serenity Prayer shows that there are things that we can control and things we can’t.
c) The aspect of control that matters the most is Influence. The most important question is not whether you are in complete control but when adversity strikes, to what extent do you perceive that you can influence whatever happens next?
d) Control is the most robust in predicting health and longevity. Those who perceive they have more control over how they do what they do tend to live nearly a full decade longer than those who accept their lot in life.
e) Engage your CORE by asking, “What facets of this situation or adversity can I potentially influence?”
2. O: Ownership
a) Ask, “How likely are you to step up to do anything to improve the situation, regardless of your job description?”
b) Don’t waste energy trying to pinpoint blame or shoulder all the responsibility yourself.
c) Do something, no matter how small, to make things better.
d) Usually you need to step up and take ownership when you least feel like doing it.
e) Engage your CORE by asking, “What can I do to affect this situation r adversity immediately and positively?”
f) Don’t give away your power or momentum by waiting for others but focus on your realm, your ownership, and then watch others do the same.
3. R: Reach
a) How does one adversity affect other areas of your life? Many engage in catastrophizing, or allowing one thing that goes wrong to spill over into other areas. Seeing a setback as devastating will stop you, but seeing it as merely one small setback will give you the ability to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward.
b) The better you are at containing difficulties the lighter you feel and the more effective you will be. The bigger and worse everything appears the more suffocating life becomes, making it difficult to keep your footing.
c) Engage your CORE to limit the size, scope, and fallout of your adversities by asking, “What can I do to minimize or contain the downside of this situation?” and “What can I do to optimize the potential upside of this situation?”
d) Dreamy optimists are dangerous but engaged optimists are hopeful that their relentless, strategically focused efforts will increase the chance that things will turn out better over time.
4. E: Endurance
a) When adversity strikes, Endurance involves asking, “How long do you predict it will last or endure?”
b) High AQ people can see past the adversity and view the worst circumstances as temporary.
c) Engage your CORE by asking, “How can I get through this as quickly as possible?”
a) When adversity strikes, Endurance involves asking, “How long do you predict it will last or endure?”
b) High AQ people can see past the adversity and view the worst circumstances as temporary.
c) Engage your CORE by asking, “How can I get through this as quickly as possible?”
d) Play the SUMMIT GAME: See yourself as having already made it through the adversity and accomplished your goal. Visualize with as much detail as possible and you will be energized to endure the adversity.
e) The FAILURE FANTASY: Visualize in vivid detail the pain and agony that will result if you allow yourself to fail. This will motivate you to endure and not give up.
D. Building your CORE
1. The best way to build your CORE is through heightened awareness, with feedback from multiple sources.
2. The CORE Panorama
a) On a scale of one to ten, how effectively do I respond to adversity?
b) Am I more effective with certain kinds of adversities than others? If so, which one am I better or worse at? Am I better at dealing with big adversities or the small, day-to-day stuff?
c) Are there certain times when I deal better with adversity than others? If so, when? What have I observed?
d) What is the most positive or negative example of how I dealt with adversity?
e) If I drew a line or continuum ranging from “helpless” to “in control” where would I typically fall when adversity strikes?
f) When the tough stuff hits, how likely am I to step up to do even the smallest thing to make the situation better?
g) How well do you think I do at keeping the adversity in its place? Do I contain the adversity or do I tend to let it spill over into everything else?
h) How long do I tend to let adversities last?
i) What do I like best about the way I handle adversity? What do I like least? Why?
j) What would be an example of a time when I have done what I just described?
k) If I were coaching me on how to handle adversity more effectively, what is the one thing I’d like me to do more, less, or differently?
3. Consider Your CORE
a) When adversity strikes, make it a habit to ask, “What’s my CORE?”
b) How much Control am I feeling or indicating?
c) To what extent am I taking Ownership and stepping up to tackle this situation?
d) How far am I willing to let this Reach? How big am I letting it become?
e) How long do I see this Enduring? To what extent am I letting this drag on?
4. Recognizing CORE
a) Analyze other people’s situations to find instances of CORE or its absence.
5. Employ the CORE Strategy
a) Control
(1) What is everything beyond our control? What things do most people consider out of our control?
(2) Of those things listed, which ones are absolutely beyond our influence? Which ones can we influence, even in some small way?
(3) Of the things we could potentially influence in this situation, which two are the most important?
b) Ownership
(1) Where and how can we step up to make the most immediate positive difference in this situation?
c) Reach
(1) What is the worst thing that could happen?
(2) If we allowed ourselves to think outrageously, what is the best thing that could happen?
(3) What things can we do to minimize the potential downside of this situation?
(4) What things can we do to maximize the potential upside of this situation?
d) Endurance
(1) What do we want life to look like on the other side of this adversity?
(2) What else can we do to get there as quickly and completely as possible?
e) The Action Funnel
(1) Which actions first?
(2) By when?
(3) How will I do it?
(4) What is the most likely obstacle?
(5) How will I deal with it?
(6) If the first action fails or falls short, then what?
(7) By when?
(8) How?
From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer
Thursday, July 25, 2024
Renunciation and Rebirth
Renunciation and Rebirth
In regard to the last of the above, it may seem to many that the ultimate requirement-to give up one's self and one's life -represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted, This attitude is particularly true in present-day Western culture, in which the self is held sacred and death is considered an unspeakable insult. Yet the exact opposite is the reality, It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and, lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.
The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call "bracketing." Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one's self-putting one's self aside, so to speak-so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self.
The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained, Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process. The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new. The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death. For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept, theory or understanding must die.
This lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births. "Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live," said Seneca two millennia ago, "and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die. "t It is also clear that the farther one travels on the journey of life, the more births one will experience, and therefore the more deaths, the more joy and the more pain.
This raises the question of whether it is ever possible to become free from emotional pain in this life. Or, putting it more mildly, is it possible to spiritually evolve to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is at least diminished? The answer is yes and no. The answer is yes, because once suffering is completely accepted, it ceases in a sense to be suffering. It is also yes because the unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. Matters that present great problems for the child and cause it great pain may be of no consequence to the adult at all. Finally, the answer is yes because the spiritually evolved individual is, as will be elaborated in the next section, an extraordinarily loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.
The answer is no, however, because there is a vacuum of competence in the world which must be filled. In a world crying out in desperate need for competence, an extraordinarily competent and loving person can no more withhold his or her competence than such a person could deny food to a' hungry infant. Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power, although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people, since more often than not they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways. Nonetheless, exercise power they do, and in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully. For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness (which is the way most decisions are made and why they are ultimately proved wrong). Imagine two generals, each having to decide whether or not to commit a division of ten thousand men to battle. To one the division is but a thing, a unit of personnel, an instrument of strategy and nothing more. To the other it is these things, but he is also aware of each and everyone of the ten thousand lives and the lives of the families of each of the ten thousand. For whom is the decision easier? It is easier for the general who has blunted his awareness precisely because he cannot tolerate the pain of a more nearly complete awareness. It may be tempting to say, "Ah, but a spiritually evolved man would never become a general in the first place." But the same issue is involved in being a corporation president, a physician, a teacher, a parent. Decisions affecting the lives of others must always be made. The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One measure-and perhaps the best measure-of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering. Yet the great are also joyful.
So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy. Perhaps you may find an answer in the remainder of this book; perhaps you will not.
A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up. You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten. If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were at the beginning: a loser. You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it, since there are many people I know who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy short-cut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and' prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.
Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of problem-solving instead of avoiding that pain-in such a way that all of life's problems can be solved. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth or reality, and balancing. Discipline is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated. In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques at the same, time and in such a way that they may be distinguishable from each other.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
In regard to the last of the above, it may seem to many that the ultimate requirement-to give up one's self and one's life -represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted, This attitude is particularly true in present-day Western culture, in which the self is held sacred and death is considered an unspeakable insult. Yet the exact opposite is the reality, It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and, lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.
The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call "bracketing." Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one's self-putting one's self aside, so to speak-so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self.
The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained, Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process. The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new. The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death. For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept, theory or understanding must die.
This lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births. "Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live," said Seneca two millennia ago, "and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die. "t It is also clear that the farther one travels on the journey of life, the more births one will experience, and therefore the more deaths, the more joy and the more pain.
This raises the question of whether it is ever possible to become free from emotional pain in this life. Or, putting it more mildly, is it possible to spiritually evolve to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is at least diminished? The answer is yes and no. The answer is yes, because once suffering is completely accepted, it ceases in a sense to be suffering. It is also yes because the unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. Matters that present great problems for the child and cause it great pain may be of no consequence to the adult at all. Finally, the answer is yes because the spiritually evolved individual is, as will be elaborated in the next section, an extraordinarily loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.
The answer is no, however, because there is a vacuum of competence in the world which must be filled. In a world crying out in desperate need for competence, an extraordinarily competent and loving person can no more withhold his or her competence than such a person could deny food to a' hungry infant. Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power, although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people, since more often than not they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways. Nonetheless, exercise power they do, and in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully. For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness (which is the way most decisions are made and why they are ultimately proved wrong). Imagine two generals, each having to decide whether or not to commit a division of ten thousand men to battle. To one the division is but a thing, a unit of personnel, an instrument of strategy and nothing more. To the other it is these things, but he is also aware of each and everyone of the ten thousand lives and the lives of the families of each of the ten thousand. For whom is the decision easier? It is easier for the general who has blunted his awareness precisely because he cannot tolerate the pain of a more nearly complete awareness. It may be tempting to say, "Ah, but a spiritually evolved man would never become a general in the first place." But the same issue is involved in being a corporation president, a physician, a teacher, a parent. Decisions affecting the lives of others must always be made. The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One measure-and perhaps the best measure-of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering. Yet the great are also joyful.
So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy. Perhaps you may find an answer in the remainder of this book; perhaps you will not.
A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up. You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten. If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were at the beginning: a loser. You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it, since there are many people I know who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy short-cut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and' prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.
Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of problem-solving instead of avoiding that pain-in such a way that all of life's problems can be solved. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth or reality, and balancing. Discipline is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated. In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques at the same, time and in such a way that they may be distinguishable from each other.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Healthiness of Depression
The Healthiness of Depression
The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with the courage to call themselves patients must go through in more, major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy. The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a lifetime. For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of "the old self' must be given up. It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist. Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image "I'm OK." This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom "I'm not OK and I need assistance to understand why I'm not OK and how to become OK" is frequently and sadly equated with "I'm weak, unmasculine and inadequate."
Recently we have been hearing of the "mid-life crisis." Actually, this is but one of many "crises," or critical stages of development, in life, as Erik Erikson taught us thirty years ago. (Erikson delineated eight crises; perhaps there are more.) What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle -that is, problematic and painful-is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things. 'Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of 'l giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken. Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity. Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:
The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
The fantasy of omnipotence
The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parents
The dependency of childhood Distorted images of one's parents
The omnipotentiality of adolescence
The "freedom" of uncommitment
The agility of youth
The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
The fantasy of immortality
Authority over one's children
Various forms of temporal power
The independence of physical health
And ultimately the self and life itself.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with the courage to call themselves patients must go through in more, major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy. The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a lifetime. For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of "the old self' must be given up. It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist. Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image "I'm OK." This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom "I'm not OK and I need assistance to understand why I'm not OK and how to become OK" is frequently and sadly equated with "I'm weak, unmasculine and inadequate."
Recently we have been hearing of the "mid-life crisis." Actually, this is but one of many "crises," or critical stages of development, in life, as Erik Erikson taught us thirty years ago. (Erikson delineated eight crises; perhaps there are more.) What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle -that is, problematic and painful-is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things. 'Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of 'l giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken. Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity. Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:
The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to
The fantasy of omnipotence
The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parents
The dependency of childhood Distorted images of one's parents
The omnipotentiality of adolescence
The "freedom" of uncommitment
The agility of youth
The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth
The fantasy of immortality
Authority over one's children
Various forms of temporal power
The independence of physical health
And ultimately the self and life itself.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Balancing
Balancing
By this time I hope it is becoming clear that the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment. Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate. To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing, and it is the fourth and final type that I would like to discuss here.
Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. To use but one example, let us consider the matter of anger and its expression. Anger is an emotion bred into us (and into less evolved organisms) by countless generations of evolution in order that our survival may be encouraged. We experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one way or another, to put us down. It leads us to fight back. Without our anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated. Only with anger can we survive. Yet, more often than not, when we initially perceive others as attempting to encroach on us, we realize upon closer examination that that is not what they intend to do at all. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger. Thus it is necessary that the higher centers of our brain (judgment) be able to regulate and modulate the lower centers (emotion). To function successfully in our complex world it is necessary for us to possess the capacity not only to express our anger but also not to express it. Moreover, we must possess the capacity to express our anger in different ways. At times, for instance, it is necessary to express it only after much deliberation and self-evaluation. At other times it is more to our benefit to express it immediately and spontaneously. Sometimes it is best to express it coldly and calmly; at other times loudly and hotly. We therefore not only need to know how to deal with our anger in different ways at different times but also how most appropriately to match the right time with the right style of expression. To handle our anger with full adequacy and competence, an elaborate, flexible response system is required. It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually cannot be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.
Mature mental health demands, then, an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually restrike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera. The essence of this discipline of balancing is "giving up." Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
By this time I hope it is becoming clear that the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment. Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate. To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing, and it is the fourth and final type that I would like to discuss here.
Balancing is the discipline that gives us flexibility. Extraordinary flexibility is required for successful living in all spheres of activity. To use but one example, let us consider the matter of anger and its expression. Anger is an emotion bred into us (and into less evolved organisms) by countless generations of evolution in order that our survival may be encouraged. We experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one way or another, to put us down. It leads us to fight back. Without our anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated. Only with anger can we survive. Yet, more often than not, when we initially perceive others as attempting to encroach on us, we realize upon closer examination that that is not what they intend to do at all. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us, we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger. Thus it is necessary that the higher centers of our brain (judgment) be able to regulate and modulate the lower centers (emotion). To function successfully in our complex world it is necessary for us to possess the capacity not only to express our anger but also not to express it. Moreover, we must possess the capacity to express our anger in different ways. At times, for instance, it is necessary to express it only after much deliberation and self-evaluation. At other times it is more to our benefit to express it immediately and spontaneously. Sometimes it is best to express it coldly and calmly; at other times loudly and hotly. We therefore not only need to know how to deal with our anger in different ways at different times but also how most appropriately to match the right time with the right style of expression. To handle our anger with full adequacy and competence, an elaborate, flexible response system is required. It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually cannot be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.
Mature mental health demands, then, an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually restrike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera. The essence of this discipline of balancing is "giving up." Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Withholding Truth
Withholding Truth
Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies. A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false. A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth. The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones. A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely. The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly~ Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.
White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings." Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial. For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent. Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.
They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries. Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful. The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage. For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them. Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."
Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children. The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective. They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote. If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents woul.d indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness, "Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time." As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them. During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear t9 be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.
So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.
All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification. Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self~ discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies. A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false. A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth. The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones. A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely. The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly~ Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.
White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings." Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial. For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent. Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.
They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries. Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful. The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage. For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them. Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."
Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children. The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective. They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote. If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents woul.d indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness, "Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time." As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them. During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear t9 be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.
So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.
All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification. Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self~ discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.
Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Dedication to the Truth
Dedication to the Truth
The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world--the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions--the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and, accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many 'do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.
By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.
But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go. Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing. When we are children we are dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again. When we have children to care for, the world looks different. from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents. When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich. We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.
Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
Transference: The Outdated Map
This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference. There are probably as many subtle variations of, the definition of transference as there are psychiatrists. My own definition is: Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.
When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are, psychotherapy is, among other things, a process of map-revising. Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. But how they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way! Frequently their need to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible.
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
Openness to Challenge
What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts. For this reason psychiatrists are encouraged to receive their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis as part of their training and development. Unfortunately, not all psychiatrists respond to this encouragement. There are many, psychiatrists among them, who stringently examine the world but not so stringently examine themselves. They may be competent individuals as the world judges competence, but they are never wise. The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. In the past in American culture, contemplation has not been held in high regard. In the 1950s people labeled Adlai Stevenson an "egghead" and believed he would not make a good President precisely because he was a contemplative man, given to deep thinking and self-doubts. I have heard parents tell their adolescent children in all seriousness, "You think too much." What an absurdity this is, given the fact that it is our frontal lobes; our capacity to think and to examine ourselves that most makes us human. Fortunately, such attitudes seem to be changing, and we are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than
outside, and that the process of constant self-examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival. Still, I am talking of relatively small numbers of people who are changing their attitudes. Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it. Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. Otherwise we live in a closed system--within a bell jar, to use Sylvia Plath's analogy, rebreathing only our own fetid air, more and more subject to delusion. Yet, because of the pain inherent in the process of revising our map of reality, we mostly seek to avoid or ward off any challenges to its validity. To our children we say, "Don't talk back to me, I'm your parent." To our spouse we give the message, "Let's live and let live. If you criticize me, I'll be a bitch to live with, and you'll regret it." To their families and the world the elderly give the message, "I am old and fragile. If you challenge me I may die or at least you will bear upon your head the responsibility for making my last days on earth miserable." To our employees we communicate, "If you are bold enough to challenge me at all, you had best do so very circumspectly indeed or else you'll find yourself looking for another job."
The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature--perhaps the one that makes us most human--is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
For individuals and organizations to be open to challenge, it is necessary that their maps of reality be truly open for inspection by the public. More than press conferences are required. The, third thing that a life of total dedication to the truth means, therefore, is a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications--not only the words that we say but also the way we say them--invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.
Taken from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world--the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions--the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and, accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.
While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many 'do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.
By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.
But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go. Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing. When we are children we are dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again. When we have children to care for, the world looks different. from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents. When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich. We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.
Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
Transference: The Outdated Map
This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference. There are probably as many subtle variations of, the definition of transference as there are psychiatrists. My own definition is: Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.
When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are, psychotherapy is, among other things, a process of map-revising. Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. But how they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way! Frequently their need to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible.
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
Openness to Challenge
What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts. For this reason psychiatrists are encouraged to receive their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis as part of their training and development. Unfortunately, not all psychiatrists respond to this encouragement. There are many, psychiatrists among them, who stringently examine the world but not so stringently examine themselves. They may be competent individuals as the world judges competence, but they are never wise. The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. In the past in American culture, contemplation has not been held in high regard. In the 1950s people labeled Adlai Stevenson an "egghead" and believed he would not make a good President precisely because he was a contemplative man, given to deep thinking and self-doubts. I have heard parents tell their adolescent children in all seriousness, "You think too much." What an absurdity this is, given the fact that it is our frontal lobes; our capacity to think and to examine ourselves that most makes us human. Fortunately, such attitudes seem to be changing, and we are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than
outside, and that the process of constant self-examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival. Still, I am talking of relatively small numbers of people who are changing their attitudes. Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it. Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged. The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers. Otherwise we live in a closed system--within a bell jar, to use Sylvia Plath's analogy, rebreathing only our own fetid air, more and more subject to delusion. Yet, because of the pain inherent in the process of revising our map of reality, we mostly seek to avoid or ward off any challenges to its validity. To our children we say, "Don't talk back to me, I'm your parent." To our spouse we give the message, "Let's live and let live. If you criticize me, I'll be a bitch to live with, and you'll regret it." To their families and the world the elderly give the message, "I am old and fragile. If you challenge me I may die or at least you will bear upon your head the responsibility for making my last days on earth miserable." To our employees we communicate, "If you are bold enough to challenge me at all, you had best do so very circumspectly indeed or else you'll find yourself looking for another job."
The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature--perhaps the one that makes us most human--is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.
For individuals and organizations to be open to challenge, it is necessary that their maps of reality be truly open for inspection by the public. More than press conferences are required. The, third thing that a life of total dedication to the truth means, therefore, is a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications--not only the words that we say but also the way we say them--invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.
Taken from The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Flight
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.
Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
Multiple Evasions
Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.
Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.
Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.
Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.
Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.
Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”
Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.
Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.
Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
Multiple Evasions
Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.
Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.
Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.
Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.
Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.
Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”
Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.
Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.
Attack
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.
Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.
A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.
Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.
Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.
A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.
Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.
The Tragedy of Addiction
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”
The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.
The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.
Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.
Overlapping Circles
Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”
The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.
The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.
Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.
Overlapping Circles
Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”
Masquerade
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”
The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.
A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”
The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.
A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.
Sin and Folly
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”
Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.
Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.
The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”
Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.
Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.
The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”
Parasite
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.
Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.
Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.
Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.
Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.
The Progress of Corruption
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.
History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.
Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.
The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”
Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.
History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.
Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.
The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”
Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.
Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”
Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.
Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.
Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”
Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.
Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.
Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”
Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.
Vandalism of Shalom
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.
1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.
1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.
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