In the field of experimental psychology, it is an open secret that we have learned a great deal about how penniless undergraduates perform in narrow and sometimes deliberately deceptive experiments, while psychiatrists, on the other hand, know about every possible variation in the behavior of people who have had mental breakdowns. The rub, from the scientific point of view, is that those two groups rarely overlap, so most of the theoretical knowledge obtained by the experimental psychologists is useless to the psychiatrists who are dealing with patients. Meanwhile, almost nobody is studying adult nonpatients, the vast bulk of humanity.
I am glad David says almost nobody, because if you notice, all of our scientific contributors discuss adult nonpatients.
Eccentricity means uniqueness, finding the freedom to be utterly one's own person (Autonomous?; Science of Professor Deci). What's the opposite, you might ask? Believe it or not, the opposite is Alienation. It might mean that an individual gives up his Self (denying what he knows to be so in favor of what someone else says is so) in order to achieve success and avoid failure.
This alienation results for we do things only as a matter of reaction or just being on auto pilot. James Herndon once said, "we come to this world (or work) each day, as so many others do, getting off the bus or out of our cars. We turn ourselves off as we turn off the car radio just when we happen to find ourselves in the parking lot. Once in the world (work), we dispose of our cans of Pepsi or Coke and our cigarettes or cigars and await the presentation of our daily lives by the boss, and it is to that presentation that we respond or worst we just react."
What would be the opposite of reaction or auto pilot? This book is all about opposite of reaction or auto pilot behavior; the term is called Mindfulness. Mindfulness is what you will learn in this book. Hopefully when we are finished with this book, we are all a bit more eccentrics or more of ourselves.
Jack Kornfield adds:
As E. E. Cummings put it, "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting." |
