Monday, August 31, 2015

CHURCHILL on Paraprosdokians and Becker on the denial of death


Ask What You Need to Know


If a person lacks money to support himself, he should be willing to do work that would normally be considered beneath his dignity. This is preferable to acting as if he has plenty of money, when actually he is in want of bread. The bible teaches this is a reasonable  and responsible  person.
Similarly, when it comes to the area of the bible and wisdom. A person should admit that he does not know, and be willing to ask others. Don't be embarrassed. Don't pretend you know what you do not really know. It will only cause you to remain ignorant.
Today, think of a question you would like to have answered, but have refrained from asking out of fear of embarrassment. Muster your courage and ask someone the question!
All you have to lose is your ignorance.

Love Yehuda Lave


Israel Museum tour of Rembrandt's Jeremiah weeping on 8/30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlQb1KGCcXc&feature=em-upload_owner

Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland singing a classical "Happy Days are here again"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFVxX3RtyhQ



Racial Prejudice in Iran is  exposed! This deserves Re-imposition of Sanctions,and Human Rights protest.  A follow up thought is, that if Barenboim were an accredited American diplomat of the Jewish Faith,he would be barred from Iran for his freedom of worship.

Article title: Iran bars Barenboim, thwarting Tehran concert plan

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4695917,00.html
Click the link above to go to the article.




Winston Churchill loved paraprosdokians
"paraprosdokians =  figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected."

1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's still on my list.
3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.
5. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
6. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
7. They begin the evening news with 'Good Evening,' then proceed to tell you why it isn't.
8. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.
9. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out, I just wanted pay checks.
10. In filling out an application, where it says, 'In case of emergency, notify:' I put "DOCTOR."
11. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.
12. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street...with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.
13. Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.
14. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.
15. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.
16. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.
17. There's a fine line between cuddling and...holding someone down so they can't get away.
18. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.
19. You're never too old to learn something stupid.
20. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.
21. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
22. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
23. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

Finally:
24. I'm supposed to respect my elders, but now it is getting harder and harder for me to find one.




Rabbi Wein in a recent class quoted a book that is quite interesting in my work with people to recognize the reality of death. I found these quotes from the work on the Internet:



The Denial of Death Quotes


The Denial of Death The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The Denial of Death Quotes (showing 1-30 of 46)
"The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person's ideas and then another's depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awarness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awarness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don't understand it simply because we don't know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons.

What are we to make of creation in which routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types - biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out - not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
tags: life
"Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
"The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst."
― Sam Keen, The Denial of Death
"...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
"Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the "others", disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we understand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday Things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

More Denial of Death Quotes



The Denial of Death The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
3,283 ratings, 4.19 average rating, 288 reviews
The Denial of Death Quotes (showing 31-60 of 46)
"Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the "artiste-manque," as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project. The neurotic can't marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone. —OMAR KHAYYAM"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. —LEO TOLSTOI"
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat "atheistic communism."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man's moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was the result of a continuation of the causa-sui project of denying creatureliness."
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

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