[postlink]http://newbestmotivator.blogspot.com/2009/07/central-self.html[/postlink]
Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little named Ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the camp. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend Guerda on a leaf. "Imagine a world," writes Guerda, "in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend."
Such is the nature of the central self, a term we use to embrace the remarkably generative, prolific, and creative nature of ourselves and the world.
If we were to design a new voyage to carry us from our endless childhood into the bright realm of possibility, we might want to steer away from a hierarchical environment and aim for the openness and reciprocity of a level playing field--away from a mind-set of scarcity and deficiency and toward an attitude of wholeness and sufficiency. We might even describe human development as the ongoing reconstruction of the calculating self toward the rich, free, compassionate, and expressive world of the central self.
Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little named Ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the camp. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend Guerda on a leaf. "Imagine a world," writes Guerda, "in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend."
Such is the nature of the central self, a term we use to embrace the remarkably generative, prolific, and creative nature of ourselves and the world.
If we were to design a new voyage to carry us from our endless childhood into the bright realm of possibility, we might want to steer away from a hierarchical environment and aim for the openness and reciprocity of a level playing field--away from a mind-set of scarcity and deficiency and toward an attitude of wholeness and sufficiency. We might even describe human development as the ongoing reconstruction of the calculating self toward the rich, free, compassionate, and expressive world of the central self.