It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in o… - Rollo May

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It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not.

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About Rollo May

Rollo Reece May (21 April 1909 – 22 October 1994) was an American humanistic and existential psychologist, authoring the influential books Psychology and the Human Dilemma and Love and Will along with several other volumes explaining and expanding on his theories.

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Alternative Names: Rollo Reece May
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The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it - mathematics is the abstract par excellence, which is indeed its glory and the reason for its great usefulness.

Additional quotes by Rollo May

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For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us?...The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back?...
This...has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be //sure// God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security.

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