“There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the “nice” man who is always smiling and agreeable. “Such a nice man,” people say. “He never gets angry.” The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life
“While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life
“Since the experience is different for each individual, the tension will reflect that experience. In some persons the whole lower half of the body is relatively immobilized and held in a passive state; in others the muscular tensions are localized in the pelvic floor and around the genital apparatus. If the latter sort of tension is severe, it constitutes a functional castration; for, although the genitals operate normally, they are dissociated in feeling from the rest of the body. Any reduction of sexual feeling amounts to a psychological castration. Generally the person is unaware of these muscular tensions, but putting pressure upon the muscles in the attempt to release the tension is often experienced as very painful and frightening.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life
“Authenticity is closely related to the voice. The word personality has two different meanings. It is derived from the persona, a mask Greek actors wore to dramatize more clearly the role they were playing. On the other hand, the word persona means “by sound,” per sona. The authentic person can be recognized behind the mask by the sound of his voice. The voice is a major avenue of self-expression, and its quality reflects the richness and resonance of the inner being. When one’s voice is limited because of neck and throat tensions, one’s self-expression is restricted and one’s being is reduced.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
“The ability to contain excitation or feeling is self-possession. It is the third stage in the therapeutic program. The first two are self-awareness and self-expression. Self-possession is the stage in which the ego functions as the standard-bearer of a self that knows who it is and what it has to do. The self possesses an ego. It is the stage in which the self experiences its being as a fully mature man or woman.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
“In a recent book, Erich Fromm advances the hypothesis that being is reduced by having. He says, “Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is, nonbeing-i.e., stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by ‘sitting on it,’ by holding on to our ego and our possessions-can the mode of being emerge.”6 According to Fromm, the two terms, being and having, represent two very different attitudes to life. The having mode is based on possessive relationships. The self is seen as the I that has a wife, a home, a car, a job, even a body. Since the I that has a body is the ego, the having mode is an egocentric position. This mode developed from and depends upon private property, power, and profit. Its focus is upon the individual rather than the community. The being mode, on the other hand, is based on loving, giving, and sharing relationships. In this mode the measure of the self is not in terms of what one owns but how much one gives or loves.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
“Every chronic muscular tension in the body has associated with it sadness, fear, and anger. Since tension is a restriction of our being, it makes us sad. It also makes us angry to be so limited. And we are frightened to show our sadness or express our anger, so we stay locked in a diminished state of being and tied to our fate.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
“As a child or animal, he is free but doesn’t know it. As an adult who aspires to be god, he equates freedom with the ability to assert his will. Both positions are equally valid. Freedom in nature is different from freedom in culture. In the latter situation the inability to assert one’s will denotes submission to the will of another. It is a loss of freedom since it is a denial of the right to express one’s feelings. An individual may not have the right to do what he wants, but we insist that he should have the right to say what he wants. In nature or culture, freedom cannot be separated from the right of self-expression.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
“Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life
“How much easier and more pleasurable life can be when one doesn’t have to make a decision because one’s desire is so clear and strong that it leaves one with no choice in behavior.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
This podcast goes into the neurobiological processes behind the concepts I am exploring about the body and how we experience the world. I believe a lot of what we “feel” is actually much more heavily rooted in the body then most people know. These two men know. A lot of my knowledge and information on the body, and mind, has come to me organically through personal exploration and growth, so its always nice to find professionals validating my ideas. It also means I’m not crazy!!! How your body feels is how your mind experiences the world. If you can learn to master the “mind” that controls your body (Insular Cortex), you can control the nervous system, which frees the “conscious” mind (prefrontal cortex) to operate from a place of wisdom, multiple view points, various lenses, the void.
The human being should not merely be skilled for all sorts of ends, but should also acquire the disposition to choose nothing but good ends. Good ends are those which are necessarily approved by everyone and which can be the simultaneously ends of everyone (Cahn, 2012).
https://vincenttriola.com/blogs/ten-years-of-academic-writing/immanuel-kant-human-nature
The thinking is problematic with education because morality is not easily deciphered in the manner that Kant claims. While people might (necessarily) agree with the idea that slavery is wrong, this does not mean that cultures do not practice it but call it something else. For example, from a western view, Islamic women might be considered enslaved due to religious practices and rules which limit their freedom and behaviors within society. The problem is that what Kant refers to as a maxim is not a consistent standard and can easily be manipulated due to the vast differences in what ethics and morality can be interpreted as across cultures and nations. This presents a severe issue for Kant’s view of education because it cannot be easily applied due to the fact that there are vast differences between groups concerning morality. This becomes further complicated in societies which practice diversity and have open education where many different cultures may interact.
There are also issues with Kant’s view of the authorities concerning education. Kant states that education should be determined by “enlightened experts” (Cahn, 2012). The problem in this case is- who will determine these experts” What is the criteria for determining the people who control the education process? More importantly is having only a select few in control of education a wise action? Education that is limited to scholastics and experts may have negative consequences because there is no outside input to question practices. This can lead to homogenized thinking such as in countries where education is highly controlled such as in countries where religion is a controlling force in education and free thought is not cultivated or respected above tradition and morality. While there is merit to Kant’s education views it may not be realistic in application.
Vincent Triola. Thu, Feb 18, 2021. Immanuel Kant & Human Nature Retrieved from https://vincenttriola.com/blogs/ten-years-of-academic-writing/immanuel-kant-human-nature
THE PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR THE FAMILY
THE TRUTH AND MEANING
Guidelines for Education within the Family
Love and Human Sexuality
10. Man is called to love and to self-giving in the unity of body and spirit. Femininity and masculinity are complementary gifts, through which human sexuality is an integrating part of the concrete capacity for love which God has inscribed in man and woman. “Sexuality is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling, of expressing and of living human love”. This capacity for love as self-giving is thus “incarnated” in the nuptial meaning of the body, which bears the imprint of the person’s masculinity and femininity. “The human body, with its sex, and its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation, as in the whole natural order, but includes right ?from the beginning’ the ?nuptial’ attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love: that love precisely in which the man-person becomes a gift and — by means of this gift — fulfils the very meaning of his being and existence”. Every form of love will always bear this masculine and feminine character.
11. Human sexuality is thus a good, part of that created gift which God saw as being “very good”, when he created the human person in his image and likeness, and “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Insofar as it is a way of relating and being open to others, sexuality has love as its intrinsic end, more precisely, love as donation and acceptance, love as giving and receiving. The relationship between a man and a woman is essentially a relationship of love: “Sexuality, oriented, elevated and integrated by love acquires truly human quality”. When such love exists in marriage, self-giving expresses, through the body, the complementarity and totality of the gift. Married love thus becomes a power which enriches persons and makes them grow and, at the same time, it contributes to building up the civilization of love. But when the sense and meaning of gift is lacking in sexuality, a “civilization of things and not of persons” takes over, “a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents…”.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/family/documents/rc_pc_family_doc_08121995_human-sexuality_en.html
Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments.
If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted…
Jesse Singal
