Existential Psychology East-West (Volume 1 - Revised & Expanded Edition) by Louis Hoffman

Author:Louis Hoffman [Hoffman, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University Professors Press
Published: 2019-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

As Christians, individuals are called to be like Jesus, not to be Jesus.

Each of the two servants in the parable accepted their different talents and traded with them. The third servant was identified as being lazy and chose to bury his talent. A simple understanding of laziness has to do with physical laziness. But if he was so lazy, why did he even bother to dig a hole to hide his talent. His laziness had much more to do with fear, the fear of the master, and perhaps the fear of fulfilling his potential. The fourth cardinal sin in the Christian tradition is the sin of accidie which is defined as: sloth, torpor, acedia: apathy, boredom. As an aside, it is interesting to point out that boredom and apathy leads to lethargy and drowsiness which has been discussed above. A number of existential thinkers from Buber, Fromm, Allport, Rogers, Jung, Maslow, and Horney, have come to interpret accidie not in the simple terms of slothfulness but the sin of failing to live up to one’s potential. Thus, the sin of the servants and virgins were not sins-of-commission of having committed some criminal act, but the sins of omission, the regret of self-condemnation, of failing to act. Such regret is certainly thematically central to both the Parable of the Virgins followed by the Parable of the Talents.

Finally, the solution to defeating death in the Christian sense is to believe in Jesus and gain salvation. What does it mean to believe in Jesus and receive salvation? Both of these Parables above told by Jesus warns us that death is inevitable and that we must be prepared, which involves not burying but actively trading our talent. Such preparation and trading in the existential sense involves Rippling. In the words of Irvin Yalom (2008):

Of all the ideas that have emerged from my years of practice to counter a person’s death anxiety and distress at the transience of life, I have found the idea of ripping to be singularly powerful. . . . Rippling does not necessarily mean leaving behind your image or your name. . . . Attempts to preserve personal identity are always futile. Transiency is forever. Rippling as I use it, refers instead to leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait; some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes on to others, known or unknown (p. 83–84).

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