书摘

1 Discipline
What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one.
Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.
Responsibility
Yet even more important than role modeling is love. Ultimately love is everything.
The feeling of being valuable –“I am a valuable person”-is essential to mental health and a cornerstone of self-discipline. It’s a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood, its extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. Conversely, when children have learned through love of their parents to fell valuable, it’s almost impossible for the vicissitude of adulthood to destroy their spirit.
Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain , forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit. If your are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.
They feel impotent because they have, in fact, given their power away.
Truth
Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life.
To a chilled his or her parents are everything, they represent the world.
Balancing
It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually can’t be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.
We must give up : 1) The fantasy of omnipotence 2)Authority over one’s children.
2. LOVE
Love: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated.
Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.
A good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people.
Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love. The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents’ failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood. Children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep-seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves.
…dependency on drugs and alcohol…”addictive personality”, they are addicted to people, sucking on them….dependency seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth.
The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.
Whenever we think of ourselves as doing something for someone else, we are in some way denying our own responsibility. Whatever we do is done because we choose to do it, and we make that choice because it is the one that satisfies us the most. Whatever we do for someone else we do because it fulfills a need we have.
The mother who insisted upon driving her adolescent son to and from school clearly cathected the boy, he was important to her-but his spiritual growth was not.
True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.
The work of attention
By far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening. Thus a business executive will spend roughly an hour of his day reading, two hours talking and eight hours listening.
3. Growth
Spiritual growth is a journey out of the microcosm into an ever greater macrocosm.
4. Grace
Education-we don’t stuff something new into their minds, rather we lead this something out of them, we bring it forth from the unconscious into their awareness. They were the possessors of the knowledge all along.
There are two kinds of power-political and spiritual.
The capacity to love is nurtured in one by loving parenting.
We make ourselves lovable(to be loved) by becoming loving, disciplined human beings. When we nurture ourselves and others without a primary concern of finding reward, then we will have become lovable, and the reward of being loved, which we have not sought , will find us.