Review of 'The Courage To Be Transformed' by Dr. Robert Moore - Part 1

03:10

What we're concerned about is how to survive as best we can and thrive if we can. To become as whole as we can be, according to Jung. To find the joy we can find, according to Tillich.

07:41

Introduce the basics of Tillich's ontology. His philosophy of being and non-being. It is the foundation of the courage to be.

09:55

To make it in life, we need to plug in to trans-personal resources that are beyond our ego. We have to understand the limits of secular culture and secular therapy.

11:35

We all have dragon bites. Our flaws. Jung and Tillich had theirs. These are what make us humans. As we talk about Jung and Tillich, we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Great geniuses usually have substantial dragon bites.

16:20

Tillich is not going to over-estimate one's possibility. A lot of people live in manic defence and denial. They say things like "evil doesn't really exist", "it's all in the mind", etc.

18:15

Existential philosophy starts with the fundamentals of human experience i.e. what all human beings must encounter no matter what their culture, religion, gender, race. Tillich, as an existential philosopher, is impatient with abstractions for the sake of abstractions.

19:58

An existential philosopher is analysing the experience of being human. Some include Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger.

22:15

Heidegger pointed at the way in which people, in their thinking, miss the most miraculous thing. Dr Robert Moore puts it this way: There is a primordial "fountain of being" and it just keeps flowing. If you're not depressed, you're gonna filled with wonder.

24:15

The first place we start in the philosophy of being is the "Fountain of Being". Tillich picked up on this and gets us to focus on this. When we focus on this, we have awareness on the power of being.

25:10

Having awareness of the power of being matters a lot because there is not just Being, but also Non-Being which is not passive but very aggresive. It attacks Being everywhere.

26:40

How aware am I, practically speaking, of the power of Being all around me and in me? How aware am I of the power and presence of Non-Being in my world and in my personality and life?

28:50

Tillich thinks that at the level of essence, that is the intentionality of Being, the richness and power and fullness of Being in its primal state, we can imagine that we should be more than we are. When we are experiencing the feeling that we should be more than we are, we are intuiting the idea of essence that is related to the fullness of the primordial power of being. There is something real that is leading us to intuit we should be more than this.

31:08

Tillich would say that we have that sense that something is not right.

32:32

What kinds of anxieties can be fixed and what kinds must be understood. Then what does one do at that point?

36:21

The first primordial polarity of human experience is the experience of self and world together. From the moment we open our eyes when we are born, there is a world. We have got to differentiate ourselves from the world. The challenge is differentiating from a merger with world, people, things but also having to figure out how to maintain contact with the world. There are 3 other polarities that we need to think about too.

38:38

There is the polarity of freedom and the polarity of destiny. Destiny in this case has to do with the givenness of our lives that we have no control over. For example born into a certain family, into a certain social class, into a certain race. We can't control these things. Things that happened to our grand parents that affect us and we don't even know about them. The Freedom pole which is that no matter what my Destiny, there is always freedom of my response to this.

41:29

It is possible for trauma to destroy our humanity and can affect our Freedom pole. One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is where in my life are the structures of destruction that are trying to destroy my humanity? Depression is losing your sense of freedom. Despair is when one gets the idea or conclusion that their Freedom is gone. Despair is a rejection of one's humanness.

43:45

Grandiosity tries to tell us there is no destiny pole. It tells us we have unlimited freedom. Despair will try to tell us it is all destiny, that there is no freedom.

44:23

There is the polarity of form and the polarity of dynamics. Think of it as Structure and Energy. At any level of being, there is always the powerful presence of form, and att he other end & at the same time, there is dynamics (energy flow). If one tends to over-emphasize form, they are probably on the compulsive side a.k.a., a controller. Form is rigidity in all its ways like social rigidity, religious rigidity, racial, class, etc. The dynamic pole is all about the transformative process like movement, change. Dynamics is usually akin to chaos.

49:19

Managing change is important, whether institutionally or in a culture or wherever. People who privilege freedom too much are gonna assume they can have unlimited change, in any amount of time, and it's always gonna be good.

52:00

There is the polarity of participation and the polarity of individualisation. We are always grounded in a systemic matrix, part of one's destiny and it has a form. It is easy to lose oneself in our participation. This leads to co-dependency. Tillich says that we all struggle with co-dependency. We need to participate. If we do not participate, we will get into massive anxiety. However, there is another type of anxiety one gets when they over-emphasize the individualisation pole. Too much autonomy is not good. It can make one crazy and you start to disconnect from people.

56:51

We tend to split on all the polarities aforementioned. When studying psycho-pathological disorders in people, some of them are either on one pole consistently or they wobble all over the place. Those who access the power of being in a regulated way, can balance the polarities in a creative equilibrium and tension.

59:30

What is Spirituality all about? It is connecting you to the primordial fountain of being and keeping you from being destroyed by that primordial energy. We need to learn to live with the polarities in optimisation.

1:01:40

These polarities are ontology. People have individual personalities. And have different configurations of the polarities. It is better to be one form (polarity) than to be all over the place. If you are predominantly one polarity, this usually means you are connected to the power of being enough. If oyu wobble between the polarities, it usually means that you are really connected to the power of being but it needs to be regulated.