This is http://www.essayz.com/a9007223.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE PERSONAL COMMUNAL DESIRE NEED 900722 There is an important difference between and open and honest expression of a felt personal need/desire on the one hand, and a dishonest manipulative personal effort to selfishly satisfy a felt personal need/desire on the other hand. It is a difference which needs to be openly and honestly recognized in order to promote both personal and communal integrity. If the members of a community cannot openly and honestly express their felt personal needs/desires without experiencing personal rejection and excommunication, then their community cannot assist the young people of the community in learning how to respond to their feelings of personal needs/desires in integrative ways. It is one thing for a person to express a felt personal need/desire in a manner which demands satisfaction of the felt need/desire. It is another thing for a person to express a felt personal need/desire in a manner which invites the assistance of others in finding integrative ways to respond with integrity to the feeling of the need/desire. It is important for a community to develop ways to acknowledge the important difference between the two manners of expression of personally felt needs and desires. Often felt needs and desires cannot be satisfied in the way which seems direct and obvious to the person who experiences the felt needs and/or desires. A direct selfish effort to achieve satisfaction through technical procedures will often lead to dissatisfaction and alienation; not to meaningful fulfillment. Young people as part of their process of growth to maturity need honest integrative guidance in finding effective ways to enjoy authentic and meaning fulfillment of felt needs and desires. Such essential guidance is impossible within social contexts in which it is not safe to openly and honestly reveal felt needs/desires. Too often honest expressions of felt needs/desires are treated as if such honest expressions were equivalent to selfish efforts to achieve satisfaction through technical procedures which violate other people's integrity. Such failures to acknowledge the important difference between the two ways of responding to felt needs/desires lead to the very kinds of selfish behaviors which people fear. The difference between open and honest expressions of felt needs/desires, and selfish attempts to satisfy such needs/desires, is an important difference which should be the focus of significant educational efforts in each and every community. Such communal educational efforts will fail to achieve the intended benefits if they fail to show full respect for the personal integrity of the most creative members of the community, members who tend not to be conformists. The educational efforts will not be integrative efforts if they disintegrate into programs of indoctrination into static standards for communal conformity and acceptance. Integrative educational efforts must be fully open and honest to be effective in leading people to enjoy the intended benefits. If such efforts disintegrate through the leadings of collusive games of mutual self deception, the actual consequences of them will be disintegrative in tragic ways which will be invisible to the educational leaders. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================