Stray thoughts: Tillich, Peck, Non-being

Whatever it is that has brought me to look into this topic, began I think with the discovery of Paul Tillich's book "The Courage to Be". Since that time I have not bothered to investigate Tillich's systematic theology, nor has that book been something I've wanted to return to. Instead, it served as a jumping-off point about the idea of "being". Perhaps not in a philosophical sense, but out a dark period of depression, understanding what it might like to be a "non-being". At the time, I interpreted the isolation and despair as something existential. Though in the 2.5 years since then my certainties and beliefs about God and reality have shifted, they have not radically changed. I now understand most of the despair as the result of a very skewed perception of myself, the result of a hyper-analytical mind turned on itself. There are many other aspects to that. My relationship with my parents that was somewhat enmeshed, making it difficult throughout my life to express my own individuality. I experienced intense guilt and shame at any point of opposition with them. What I experienced during this time (or at least, the vocabulary I encountered at the time) was, as M. Scott Peck might put it, a shifting of my cognitive map of reality. We develop a map that defines our perception of life, but at some point, we find our map is asked to change because it is incomplete. It does not match reality. In a book on Religion and Spirituality in the Life Cycle, James Gollnick puts it this way:

"First human beings are not born with such maps, a great deal of effort is required to construct a moral and cognitive map of reality. The more we are able to perceive and appreciate reality, the more accurate the map will be. Peck maintains that many are

unwilling or unable to expend the time and energy to make the necessary changes to

the reality maps as life continues to unfold."

This process is also very tied to the necessity of courage, as the changing of cultivated ideas about oneself, the world and God are incredibly difficult to transform with new information about reality. In the midst of my mental map being challenged, my responses were childlike, a breadth of concerns and anxieties that asked for parental-like assurance. What I gained instead was the robust insistence of a counselor for "Courage!"

Courage and Alfred Adler

Courage. The meaning of
the term conjures the color red, a lion without a heart, a soldier in
a muddy trench, the special olympics. We associate courage with a loud act—a movement taken
when the heart could stop, when the body is in danger, when the tides
are turned in the wrong direction. But courage is not miraculous.
In the words of Cormac Mccarthy, courage is a form of constancy.

As an aspect of mental health, a person can be both En-couraged, and Dis-couraged. Most of the writing I am finding so far about the topic in the realm of psychology, has come from the Adlerian school of therapy. Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud's, turned away from the often cynical naturalism of psychoanalysis, and is to thank in part for positive psychology--focused upon the nobleness of human beings. In "the Psychology of Courage", the authors Yang, Milliren and Blangen (all Adlerians) examine courage as the response to a "persistent threat to well-being". It is a kind of psychological muscle, that deals with fear particularly when, the authors say," it grows larger than our fear. In that case, fear becomes anxiety"(p.5). In Adler's world, fear (the kind that becomes anxiety) is the cause of our Inferiority Complex, our feeling that we "are incapable of meeting the world's demands"(p. 6). This inferiority is inextricably tied to our ability to relate socially--the more inferior we feel, the more we are turned toward isolation. Courage then for Adler, is a movement towards social contribution and participation.

-Life Style is what Adler used to refer to the composite parts of each individual used to interact with the world, or "the totality of the behavioral strategies and safeguards that take us to our successes and failures"(8).

-Characterizations of Courageous individual: "the absence of self-serving interest, safeguards, exploitation and superiority, [as well as the presence of] aesthetics, agape, altruism, courage, hope, empathy, meaning, endurance, movement, stillness, coherence, encouragement, reconcilliation, wholeness, regeneration, and social connectedness"(8).