claim

active

claim:the-message-that-one-must-please-oneself-perfectly-in-order-to-reach-god-was-exactly-the-message-of-st-francis

The message that one must please oneself, perfectly, in order to reach God, was exactly the message of St. Francis.

Alexander's reinterpretation of St. Francis: pleasing God and pleasing oneself truly are the same thing.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Thinkers (1)

thinker

St. Francis of Assisi
associated_with
Christian saint who emphasized love of every living creature, a teaching cited as one path to the ground.

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.

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.

To please yourself, you may have to make a thing in which God is visible.claim0.798
The troubling consequence of true self-pleasing: it produces beauty so deep it reveals the divine, which makes modern people uncomfortable.
Pleasing oneself, when it is truly done, leads to the most sublime, the most profound, the most truly spiritual art.claim0.787
Alexander claims that true pleasing oneself is identical to the path intended by the greatest religious teachers.
In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves.claim0.748
The central thesis of the chapter: pleasing yourself is the necessary and sufficient prescription for creating living structure.
Making something that truly pleases requires hundreds of subtle judgments, each extracting what pleases more within the whole.claim0.739
From the West Dean experience: the north wall alone required approximately 500 such judgments.
This quality, whether it occurs in a great work or a small work, always has the same essential purpose: to make a connection to the I, to reach, in material substance, the face of God.claim0.737
The purpose of all living quality is to connect to the I.
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.claim0.736
Diagnosis of why living structure is absent from the world: a failure of emotional knowledge enforced by social and internal constraints.
If we reach the innocence of the child where we only please ourselves, then we will achieve the egoless state in which we see structure perfectly and make the perfect structure-preserving response.hypothesis0.733
Conditional claim linking childlike self-pleasing to flawless perception and action.
Pleasing yourself and doing what is right are one and the same.claim0.732
The most radical claim of the chapter: the subjective and the ethical are identical at the deepest level.