Sam Keen

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

— Sam Keen

Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

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

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

Living mythical-political systems are invisible to those who live within them. The problem of myth and consciousness is reflected in the old saying: We don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish. Myth is the sea of commonly accepted assumptions that are not questioned by the majority of those living within a system. To the average, normal member of society, the myth is what is natural and obvious.

— Sam Keen

It is only from the perspective of the outlaw … that we are able to see that mythically informed normality is a form of mass hypnosis.

— 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

Overstimulation of the adrenal glands (with consequent exhaustion of the spirit) is the price of our incorporation within the male womb of the modern corporate society.

— Sam Keen

A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.

— 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 female has learned by long experience to win by losing, to wield power in the passive-aggressive manner of the sadomasochist.

— Sam Keen

The decision to become an individual, to allow oneself to be moved by the deepest impulses of the self rather than the social consensus, can only be made with fear and trembling.

— 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

There is a crucial difference between the criminal and the outlaw. The criminal is a perverse rebel who acts out against the law. … The outlaw is a supranormal individual who cares about others too much to accept the limitations on eros that are imposed by normal life. Thus the outlaw question moves outside end beyond, not against the law. While the rebel is an antinomian, merely rejecting the established, the outlaw is motivated by a quest for autonomy.

— Sam Keen

The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.

— Sam Keen

The outlaw is the conscious warrior who makes use of the aggression to break down the walls, barriers, and boundaries that artificially separate and alienate.

— Sam Keen

Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget. They tempt us to disown the common capacity of the human spirit to transcend normality.

— Sam Keen

It is the vocation of each person to become unique.

— Sam Keen

Outlaw consciousness is born the moment I drop out, stop the world, cease being an actor identified with the mythic roles I have been playing in society. Change begins when I do nothing except observe. The wisdom of the railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. Meditation is the healthy form of voyeurism.

— 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

A prime time to catch yourself putting on your personality is in the moments between sleeping and waking.

— Sam Keen

Self-awareness and self-consciousness are entirely different. When I am “self-conscious,” it is really someone else’s eyes that are watching, judging, and criticizing me. … It is these eyes that must be put out if I am to make sense of and remain in touch with my true self. And when we fail to find symbolic ways of destroying the watchers by becoming our own true witness, then the parents or authorities are sometimes literally killed.

— 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

The path that leads from the persona to the self, from the adult to the outlaw, consists of learning to distinguish between false desire and true desire, or superficial desire and profound desire, or obsessive desire and free passion, … or illusory needs and real needs.

— Sam Keen

In back of the outward calm … a small terrified voice cries out: “I need it. I have to have it or ...” The end of the sentence is lost in chaos. The need is so strong that an illusion is created that it must be fulfilled, or the very existence of the self is threatened.

— Sam Keen

In the presence of our addictions, we are not free to ask what we really desire. Eros is silent. The addiction floods us with the noise of its demands, the plans for its satisfaction. There is no interval for deliberation.

— 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

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

The neurosis of normality is a case of repetition compulsion caused by the repression of awareness.

— Sam Keen

When … some intimation of the eternal significance of my time moves through the heart of my self, it must still battle a positivistic turn of mind and mean-spirited secularism that denies the existence of the holy.

— Sam Keen

The evil we previously objectified and assigned to exterior agents—devils, communists, capitalists, chauvinists, faithless lovers, the system—must be discovered within. We can no longer divide the world between good and evil. The line between saints and sinners runs down the middle of my being. .. I destroy my propaganda machine that automatically casts me in a favorable light and others in the shadow.

— 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

Meditation, like masturbation, has until recently been considered a form of self-abuse.

— Sam Keen

The difference between narcissism and self-love is a matter of depth. Narcissus falls in love not with the self, but with an image or reflection of the self—with the persona, the mask. The narcissist sees himself through the eyes of another, changes his lifestyle to conform with what is admired by others, tailors his behavior and expression of feelings to what will please others. Narcissism is … voluntary blindness, an agreement … not to look beneath the surface.

— Sam Keen

To love the carnal self means to love the body-mind. I cannot abuse my body with alcohol, stress, and self-indulgence and still claim to love my self.

— Sam Keen

One of the commonest perversions of love is to limit it to the private sphere.

— Sam Keen

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

— Sam Keen