Man's Search for Himself

The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is twenty or forty or sixty: it rather is whether he fulfills his own capacity of self-conscious choice at his particular level of development.

Living in the eternal moment does not mean mere intensity of living (though self-awareness always adds some intensity to one’s experience): nor does it mean living by an absolute dogma, religious or otherwise, or by a moral rule. It means, rather, making one’s decisions in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one’s own unique character as a person.

The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility

Like self-awareness itself, this experiencing of the reality of the present can be cultivated. It is often useful to ask one’s self, “What do I experience at this very moment?” Or “Where am I—what is most significant to me emotionally—at this given moment?”

This is why in therapy “experiencing” is always more powerful and curative than talking about experiences

The tendencies in conservative religion, as in Czarist Russia, to turn people’s minds from their present social and economic injustices by promises of future rewards were rightly attacked by Marx. Religion is then in actual fact an opiate, a drug for desensitizing the people.

It is as though the goal were to be as little alive as possible—as though life, as Fred Allen so pungently put it, “is an unprofitable episode that disturbs an otherwise blessed state of non-existence.”

Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by one’s self as necessary for the attainment of some greater goal.

But, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening “void.” On the everyday level this is shown in the fear of boredom.

I think it was C. G. Jung who said, accurately enough, that a person is afraid of growing old to the extent that he is not really living now.