Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world; there is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around yuou. We are born to manifest the Glory of God that is within us. It’s not ust in some of us, it’sin everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Nelson Mandela, 1994 inaugural speech.
George Ivanovich Gurdjeff said
If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him—to escape from the general law, to be free. (Quoted in P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 364.)
Slightly reworded: “If a person could understand all the horror of the ordinary circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if E could understand what E is losing by such a life, E would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for hir—to escape from the general law, to be free.”
Agenda 21, 6.23: “The general objectives of protecting vulnerable groups [5:21 “such as rural landless workers, ethnic minorities, refugees, migrants, displaced people, women heads of household”] are to ensure that all such individuals should be allowed to develop their full potential (including healthy physical, mental and spiritual development). . .”
“Most of us will log five to fifty times the experience of our ancestors of two hundred years ago. Many of them received at birth the pattern for their lives, growing up to be farmer, weaver, soldier, priest, or mother bearing and burying one baby after another. . . . It has been said that as many events have happened from 1945 to today as have happened in the two thousand years before 1945.” Jean Houston, A Passion for the Possible. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997, p. 3
Man’s principal task today is to create a new self, adequate to command the forces that now operate so aimlessly and yet so compulsively. This self will necessarily take as its province the entire world, known and knowable, and will seek, not to impose a mechanical uniformity, but to bring about an organic unity, based upon the fullest utilization of all the varied resources that both nature and history have revealed to modern man.
—Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man, New York: Harper & Row, 1956
“As far as we can discern,” writes Jung in the chapter in his memoir where he explores his own dreams of life and beyond death, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
“The more we discover about expanded human capacities, the more I come to believe in a future where such capacities are no longer the exception, but rather the norm in human experience.” Barbara McNeill, Director of Communications, IONS; Exec. Ed., Noetic Sciences Review.
Frank G. Goble writes that William James considered his conclusion that most humans only use a small part of their potential to be among his most important discoveries. Goble quotes James, without specific reference: “Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. . . . we are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources.”
Frank G. Goble,
The Third Force (New York: Washington Square Press, 1971 [1970]) 54.