must never attempt to subvert or sabotage the proper function of consciousness.
In order to deal with reality successfully—to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires—man needs
self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth. Anxiety and guilt, the antipodes of self-esteem and
the insignia of mental illness, are the disintegrators of thought, the distorters of values and the paralyzers of action.
When a man of self-esteem chooses his values and sets his goals, when he projects the long-range purposes that
will unify and guide his actions, it is like a bridge thrown to the future, across which his life will pass, a bridge
supported by the conviction that his mind is competent to think, to judge, to value, and that he is worthy of
enjoying values.
As I have stressed earlier (Chapter Seven), this sense of control over reality, of control over one's own existence, is
not the result of special skills, ability, or knowledge. It is not dependent on particular successes or failures. It
reflects one's fundamental relationship to reality, one's conviction of fundamental efficacy and worthiness. It
reflects the certainty that, in essence and in principle, one is right for reality.
It is this psychological state that traditional morality makes impossible, to the extent that a man accepts its tenets.
And this is one of the foremost reasons why a psychotherapist cannot be indifferent to the question of moral values
in his work.
Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrifice is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines
are destructive existentially and psychologically.
- The maintenance of his life and the achievement of self-esteem require of man the fullest exercise of his
reason—but morality, men are taught, rests on and requires faith.
Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.
When a man rejects reason as his standard of judgment, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings.
A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
To practice the "virtue" of faith, one must be willing to suspend one's sight and one's judgment; one must be willing
to live with the unintelligible, with that which cannot be conceptualized or