All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.
I do not want to believe that we are essentially a people obsessed with security (safety, insurance, prisons, protection, labeling laws); nor that we are a people enslaved to consumerism; enchanted by the media, entertainment and celebrity; dependent on relationships; or that we are a narcissistic society in love with its own childhood to the utter denial of our national tragedies, unable to imagine a meaningful future. These diagnoses observe symptoms only, without getting to the fundamental syndrome of which the symptoms are but fluctuating and fashionable manifestations. The deeper syndrome is inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginative vision, adventurous thinking and intellectual clarification. That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation. These are symptoms of the soul in search of clarity. Clarity is the essential. The soul is desperately seeking the power of mind to be applied to the powerlessness it experiences.
That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt.
When his [Abraham Maslow's] students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. It is as if reminding yourself of their existence is enough to make them happen.
