Paradigms power perceptions, perceptions power emotions.
When you dream, all the scenery, characters, events, perils, and outcomes are built from your own consciousness, the darks and oppressions as well as the delights. Same with the world awake, though it takes you longer to build it.
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.
I think memories are like dreams. Not reliable proof of anything. I can't prove a memory any more than I can prove a dream.
So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained, not just in society but in literature. The women's movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don't know whether it can ever clean up the mess in our minds.
It is no more informative to speak of self-efficacy in global terms than to speak of nonspecific social behavior
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
Most of these - most people's stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography.
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.
Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.
