MaryT
Posts: 553
Joined: 12/8/2006
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: adaddysgirl
i don't really see a 'great ego' as the same thing as 'self approval'. i think you can approve of what you do, feel happy about it, content about it....or fulfilled (as i used before) without having a big ego about it. Don't you think that these people felt some satisfaction in what they did....which led to self approval? And obviously most of those they affected appreciated them too.
Self-esteem and self-approval mean virtually the same thing. There is a difference between that and simply valuing self as important. Buddhists of a certain lineage have a practice called mitree that translates into unconditional friendliness (with self first and others as one progresses), which is a very different thing than unconditional approval. Peck's whole deal was that the necessity to feel good about oneself is ultimately destructive because it excludes feeling bad, and therefore precludes a course correction. Bush has demonstrated that characteristic in aces.
I don't believe Mother Theresa gave a twit about self-approval. Nelson Mandela most certainly did not feel good about his life for a good part of it, nor did he have any idea that anyone appreciated him or even knew he was alive on Robben Island. In both cases, they were reaching for something beyond self - a greater good. That is what made them great. Socrates knew full well that if he didn't shut the hell up, the crowd would kill him. He wasn't aiming for self-approval and certainly not the approval of others - he was trying to get them to clue in. In death, he succeeded, but as the man was in reality atheist (from everything I and my two philosophy instructors could tell), whose approval was he shooting for? Donald Trump is considered great by many, and he definitely is addicted to his own approval and driven in that regard. I think he's a jerk myself.
quote:
It's a wonderful circle when you are good at something, you enjoy doing because it feels good to you, and others benefit from it in some way....if you approve of yourself and they approve of you also. That's how i think it was for those you mentioned above.
Again, I disagree. What they did was not based on feeling good. If it was, they could not have accomplished what they did.
quote:
Obviously, if someone is great at something but doesn't feel good about it and only does it for others, then that's another story.
Beethoven.
quote:
Or conversely, if someone is great at something and does feel good about it but gets no approval from others, then i guess that's a different story too.
Van Gogh.
quote:
Again shrugs, only because i don't usually continue doing something i don't find fulfilling regardless of how well i do it or how much other's 'approve' of it.
I think most of the western world is fairly enslaved doing what they don't want to do because society expects it. It's the human condition, near as I can tell.
quote:
i guess i would even be more apt to do it for myself even if others didn't approve....but i did. But that's just me, of course.
Me too and probably most of us here since we're swimming upstream in following our bliss. 
The funny part about this discussion is that I consider my submissive bend to be as much an approval kink as anything else. OTOH, I'm not shooting for greatness in kink. It's all about pleasure.
MaryT
|
RE: Do agree or Disagree? - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread