Pleasing yourself and doing what is right are one and the same.

The most radical claim of the chapter: the subjective and the ethical are identical at the deepest level.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Thinkers (1)

thinker

Lily Alexander
supports
Alexander's daughter, age 15, who gave him the formulation that what deeply pleases you is what pleases God.

Concepts (1)

concept

Pleasing Yourself
associated_with
The core prescription of the chapter: making what truly pleases you at the deepest level, which Alexander argues is the key to creating all living structure and the path to the I.

Claims (2)

claim

In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves.
extends
The central thesis of the chapter: pleasing yourself is the necessary and sufficient prescription for creating living structure.
Truly pleasing ourselves is not shameful. It is transcendent.
extends
The moral revaluation: what society treats as self-indulgence is actually the path to transcendence.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

What pleasing yourself truly IS, is the process in which we create living structure.claim0.819
The culminating identity claim: the act of true self-pleasing and the creation of living structure are one and the same process.
Pleasing oneself, when it is truly done, leads to the most sublime, the most profound, the most truly spiritual art.claim0.813
Alexander claims that true pleasing oneself is identical to the path intended by the greatest religious teachers.
Is it even permissible, today, to please yourself?question0.782
Question raised by the bridge example about whether contemporary society allows genuine self-pleasing.
To please yourself, you may have to make a thing in which God is visible.claim0.781
The troubling consequence of true self-pleasing: it produces beauty so deep it reveals the divine, which makes modern people uncomfortable.
Making something that truly pleases requires hundreds of subtle judgments, each extracting what pleases more within the whole.claim0.770
From the West Dean experience: the north wall alone required approximately 500 such judgments.
Do one small good thing; then do another small good thing; then do another good thing.quote0.759
Practical, accessible summary of the incremental nature of living process, from Alexander's garden advice.
If we can only learn how to please ourselves, that prescription by itself will always create living structure.hypothesis0.757
The conditional claim that true self-pleasing is sufficient for generating living structure in all cases.
People do not know—emotionally—how to please themselves. In part, they are prevented by society. And in part, they are prevented by themselves, by their inner thought police.claim0.757
Diagnosis of why living structure is absent from the world: a failure of emotional knowledge enforced by social and internal constraints.