Do not be deceived by how power is portrayed in the media.

Power, as with other sought after prizes, is not what it appears to be. There is always what goes on behind the scenes. While a celebrated artist may be able to pull strings and seemingly call his own shots, this show of force dangles on a mighty thin power line called in vogue. 

Creation is power. Power is energy. Power need not be ruthless, which is the mentally disturbed model. Power and compassion represent the evolved model, and that’s why the hero wins in the end. 

Evolution of the individual is one of the basic concepts of Humanistic Psychology and what one of its principal founders Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) called the fully realized human being.

Maslow wrote in his book, The Psychology of Science: “Long ago I learned from my artist-wife of her irritation with some of my scientist’s obsessional classifying ways. For example, I asked always, in a kind of conversational tic, for the name of the bird or the flower or the tree that I admired. It was as if I were not content to admire and to enjoy but also had to do something intellectual about it.”

Maslow had realized that “something intellectual” was no substitute for the aesthetic experience. 

As Carl Jung concluded:

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world.

There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.

Sonata in F Major, KV332, Adagio

Treat yourself to this piano sonata from the palette of keys by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whose pure emotion transcends time and space.

Feel the notes of genius dance with your soul as you are carried off into a reverie that delicately borders but does not dwell on sentimentality. 

The interpretation by pianist Daniel Barenboim is especially moving. 

In the Declaration of Independence, we read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The ink that would soon turn blood red and now flowed black from Thomas Jefferson’s pen did not write: We hope these truths are obvious.

To its credit, there is not a single utterance of hope or any other passive word in this magical document that the Founding Fathers bestowed upon posterity. 

Remember what the master from India said: “It is better to live in fulfillment than in hope.”