At the end of another great period of collective effort called The Crusades, the social institutions and cultural forces that had coordinated and contained individual energies collapsed. Whole armies disintegrated into their component individuals and sub-groupings. Knights who had ridden forth under the banner of this leader or that rode back on their own. They were the “free lances” who made the late medieval world such a dangerous yet dynamic place.
It’s no accident that today we’re surrounded once again by free lances. The old rules are gone, and the new rules aren’t clear. Security—so far as there is any—is largely something that we must build for ourselves. Identities are confused and changing. We know that ultimately we are on our own, and so we are ready to learn a new way of doing and being. We know that our organizations were designed to serve the needs of another world, so we busy redesigning them.
But we also need a social order that provides for our new needs and doesn’t try to impose archaic obligations on us. We need new laws. We need new leaders. We need a new social principle, an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. We need a new sense of the common good to justify the sacrifices we’ll need to make to help those who find the new world the most difficult. To create these things, we must begin by remembering that we are all in this together.
William Bridges
JobShift: How To Prosper In A Workplace Without Jobs
Month: August 2024
Categories
Integrating Mythological Experiences
A living myth is in many ways a fantasy that has become a way of life. To me, the most vital aspect of mythology is not found in the stories of gods and goddesses of long ago, nor in the the psychological truths those stories reflect, but rather in the contemporary framework of images and meaning that are found in our way of life—the rhythm and structure of our weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles—and the myth that informs our life.
The problem is, however, that we don’t trust our own mythic imagination. In fact, the eruption of mythological fantasies in a person’s life is a psychological problem of a first degree. Other cultures in other times had ways of integrating mythological experiences into the whole fabric of personal and social life. We, by contrast, often don’t know what to make of such experiences.
D. Stephenson Bond
Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life
Categories
Seeing the World in a New Way
It’s never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.
John Seely Brown
Categories
Life Is a Daring Adventure
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
Helen Keller
We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known …
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.And where we had thought to slay another
Joseph Campbell
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.
Categories
Letting My Experience Carry Me On
Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy