The Secret Life.
April 19, 2010
"Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme and we then get the formidable neurasthetic and psychasthetic conditions with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities that so many medical books describe.
Stating the thing broadly, the human being thus lives usually far within his limits: He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is deseased while in the rest of us it is only a inveterate habit, the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad.
Admit so much, then, and admit also that the charge of being inferior to their full self is far truer of some men than of others, then the practical question ensues: To what do better men owe their escape? and, in the fluctuations which all men feel in their own degree of energizing, to what are the improvements due when they do occur?
In general terms the answer is plain: Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement or some unusual idea of necessity induces them to make an extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word are what carry us over the dam.
In those "hyperesthetic" conditions which chronic invalidism so often brings in it's train, the dam has changed it's normal place. The slightest funtional exercise gives a distress which the patient yields to and and stops. In such cases of "habit - neurosis" a new range of power often comes in consequence of the "bullying treatment" of efforts which the doctor obliges the patient, much against his will, to make. First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief. there seems no doubt that we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit neurosis."
William James
Stating the thing broadly, the human being thus lives usually far within his limits: He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is deseased while in the rest of us it is only a inveterate habit, the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad.
Admit so much, then, and admit also that the charge of being inferior to their full self is far truer of some men than of others, then the practical question ensues: To what do better men owe their escape? and, in the fluctuations which all men feel in their own degree of energizing, to what are the improvements due when they do occur?
In general terms the answer is plain: Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement or some unusual idea of necessity induces them to make an extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word are what carry us over the dam.
In those "hyperesthetic" conditions which chronic invalidism so often brings in it's train, the dam has changed it's normal place. The slightest funtional exercise gives a distress which the patient yields to and and stops. In such cases of "habit - neurosis" a new range of power often comes in consequence of the "bullying treatment" of efforts which the doctor obliges the patient, much against his will, to make. First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief. there seems no doubt that we are each and all of us to some extent victims of habit neurosis."
William James
Posted by Michael Salisbury. Posted In : Illusion
