Unfolding Quotes - page 4
The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, and literature, and art, and all of that – to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.
Jordan Peterson
Whose American dream? The dream is a chameleon; it has changed again and again. For the first immigrants, America was a continent to explore and exploit, a haven for the unwanted and the dissenters-a new beginning. Gradually the dream became an ascetic and idealized image of democracy, bespeaking the age-old hope for justice and selfgovernance. All too quickly, that dream metamorphosed into an expansionist, materialist, nationalist, and even imperialist vision of wealth and domination-paternalism, Manifest Destiny. Yet even then, there was a competing Transcendentalist vision: excellence, spiritual riches, the unfolding of the latent gifts of the individual.
Marilyn Ferguson
A defect, as such, does not imply determinations in any direction. The individual's happiness is in the continuous unfolding of his experience, and also in the fruitfulness of his suffering. The criterion of his happiness is his power and permission to grow into his own self, with all that this involves. This, in turn, depends on other circumstances; the reality or mere ostensibility of his reception; the degree to which he is allowed, together with his defects and inherited birth constellations, to be integrated into his community; and the degree to which the community is permitted to become integrated into what he, the individual, represents.
Martti Siirala