Sam Keen Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

A man must go on a quest / to discover the sacred fire / in the sanctuary of his own belly / to ignite the flame in his heart / to fuel the blaze in the hearth / to rekindle his ardor for the earth

Sam Keen
On the pilgrim's path each man must become Moses, going on a vision quest to some mountaintop and returning with the ten or twenty commandments that he holds sacred. So long as we obey or break the rules that have been set up for us by the Giants - Parents and other Authorities - we remain good or bad children. Growing into the fullness of our humanity means that we become co-authors of the rules by which we will agree to have our lives judged.

Sam Keen
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.

Sam Keen
To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

Sam Keen
If you live out of a negative identity, … others will always be cast in the mold of the enemy against whom you must struggle.

Sam Keen
Addiction depends upon keeping the multiplicity of our desires unconscious. When I invite all that I am into awareness, I realize that no one substance, activity, or person has the capacity to satisfy me fully. I leave aside the security of the fix and begin the adventure of falling in love with the multiplicity of the self and the world.

Sam Keen
For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role. The outlaw quietly takes a seat in the back row of the theater of the mind and watches.

Sam Keen
The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair.

Sam Keen
To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.

Sam Keen
The outlaw will often wonder whether asserting the right to know, to taste, to experience, to judge is not an act of arrogance. … To become an outlaw, I must decide that my personal experience rather than the mores of the tribe is the authority upon which I will base my judgments. In a bold act of self-love and self-trust, the outlaw proclaims that individual to be higher than the universal.

Sam Keen
Within the horizon of this [western] myth, love is understood as the artificial restraining of our natural impulses toward unbridled aggression.

Sam Keen
The man who comes home exhausted because he has been taught to believe without question that his male identity is based on nine-to-five loyalty and the giving of his best energies to the corporation has made a decision about his sexuality. He sacrifices his corpus to the corporation. His chosen method of expending energy and structuring time disallows afternoon dalliance with his wife or lover.

Sam Keen
[Some of the] rules and articles of faith [of the western myth]:
Questions that cannot be answered should not be asked.
Knowledge and power are the twin pillars of human identity.
Knowledge consists of organized facts.
Sensation, intuition, and feeling are primitive, immature forms of thought.
Wealth is created by fabricating natural, raw materials into finished products; the production of goods is the basis of value.
Economics has replaced religion as the ultimate concern.
The chief motivation (eros) of human beings is to accumulate and consume.
Advertising and propaganda are the chief erotic sciences of the modern age.

Sam Keen
A major component of the western myth is the belief that myth is a primitive and mistaken way of thinking about the world that has been replaced by science. Commonly, the word myth is now used to mean an illusion or a lie... Enlightened moderns are accustomed to looking at the queer beliefs of the Mayas or the Tassaday and seeing them as mythical. But we look on our own belief systems as rational and rooted in the realities of politics and economics. As Joseph Campbell says: Myth is other people's religion.

Sam Keen
In a political situation where tyranny reigns and rebellion is not tolerated, few men and women will have the luxury of going beyond the stance of the rebel.

Sam Keen
There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.

Sam Keen
There are at least three fundamental ways in which the rebel impulse may become perverse: (1) [we can] get caught in a stance that always positions us against others; (2) [we can be] deficient in the power to say no, and hence follow the path of least resistance; and (3) [we can] seek to prolong the adolescent dream of endless possibilities, and hence live in a moratorium from commitments.

Sam Keen
The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.

Sam Keen
Where authority represses freedom, rebellion becomes the hard work of love, which is necessary because love, freedom, and spirit are inseparable.

Sam Keen
The carrot of happiness has been dangled in front of me, just beyond my reach for as long as I can remember, and I have never gained on it. It is always still just a step beyond me. And, what's worse, I have been hypnotized by the promise so that I keep going for it, stay in the harness. The moment I turn my eyes from the carrot and ask the radical question about my true desires, I step out of the harness and begin to wander freely in search of what will satisfy my hungers.

Sam Keen
Pleasers … make up what Earl Shorris has called the oppressed middle, the middle-managers who enjoy the comforts of fearful people and pay by submitting to their superiors' definitions of happiness and success.

Sam Keen
The gentlest and most insidious way we are dominated by the body politic is by the official versions of the good life that are implicit in advertising and propaganda. Happiness is a new car, a color TV—fill in the gap with your own freely chosen artificially stimulated desire.

Sam Keen
The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

Sam Keen
The bleeding hearts who want love without anger, relationship without conflict, harmony without contradictions, are forced to create an illusory world of unambivalent love. … It is not accidental that such perfect persons (who never question their own motives, or suspect their hidden ideology or self-interest) make other feel tainted and guilty. Every sentimental sermon is served with a side-dish of guilt. In their presence, honest doubt is named cynicism, anger is called evil, and ambivalence is castigated as craziness.

Sam Keen
Kierkegaard said that the only way we can be released from the enchantment, the siren song of the myths, is to play the music through backwards. To break the spell of the ego I must recover my personal and political history, I must demythologize the private, family, and public myths that have informed me.

Sam Keen
Being impotent because they have never dared to assert themselves, they continually play the blame game. They are innocent and powerless and, therefore, others are always to blame when things go wrong. … They have yet to bite the apple of consciousness.

Sam Keen
The moment I step out of my adult identity, it becomes obvious that my tribe is not significantly different from other tribes in its habitual projection of blame for conflict onto an enemy. It is disturbing for an individual to reject the tribe's claim to self-righteousness because it excludes him or her from the civil religion, the social immortality system, and the ritual of scapegoating, in which guilt is alleviated by being assigned to an outcast or enemy that the tribe may destroy in the name of God.

Sam Keen
Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.

Sam Keen
Secular culture, with the aid of psychoanalysis, has continued the old Christian habit of observing the self only to criticize it.

Sam Keen
We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.

Sam Keen