Truly pleasing ourselves is not shameful. It is transcendent.

The moral revaluation: what society treats as self-indulgence is actually the path to transcendence.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Questions (2)

question

Is it really OK to have this much fun?
gates
The investment banker's question that reverberated for fifteen years; gates the claim that true self-pleasing is socially permissible.
Is it even permissible, today, to please yourself?
gates
Question raised by the bridge example about whether contemporary society allows genuine self-pleasing.

Claims (1)

claim

Pleasing yourself and doing what is right are one and the same.
extends
The most radical claim of the chapter: the subjective and the ethical are identical at the deepest level.

Quotes (1)

quote

I kept on shouting out in a low voice, I did it. I could not contain myself; it was an ecstasy. Even now, ten minutes after I finished, I am still trembling.
supports
Alexander's first-person account of painting The Pink Cloud, capturing the ecstatic quality of truly pleasing oneself in the act of creation.

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.

Pleasing oneself, when it is truly done, leads to the most sublime, the most profound, the most truly spiritual art.claim0.812
Alexander claims that true pleasing oneself is identical to the path intended by the greatest religious teachers.
What pleasing yourself truly IS, is the process in which we create living structure.claim0.805
The culminating identity claim: the act of true self-pleasing and the creation of living structure are one and the same process.
Pleasing Yourselfconcept0.772
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.
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.claim0.751
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.hypothesis0.738
Conditional claim linking childlike self-pleasing to flawless perception and action.
Making something that truly pleases requires hundreds of subtle judgments, each extracting what pleases more within the whole.claim0.735
From the West Dean experience: the north wall alone required approximately 500 such judgments.
To please yourself, you may have to make a thing in which God is visible.claim0.733
The troubling consequence of true self-pleasing: it produces beauty so deep it reveals the divine, which makes modern people uncomfortable.
The life which seems best in our world comes from efforts that are uncensored, natural and straightforward, from impulses close to our emotions and joy.claim0.733
Alexander's opening assertion about the character of true modern life.