Looking for a book about the triumph of the human spirit

[Steppingfeet]

Thank you, Aion, Vasilia, and FirstDistortion. I will look into all these. I would appreciate other suggestions.

I would suggest 'Man's Search for Meaning' by Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz by the power of attitude and optimism. This led him to create a system of therapy called Logotherapy, based on the idea of finding optimism and meaning in life despite any circumstance.

I've read this. It is a towering work. And that is a concise synopsis. Thank you.

When he is on one of his daily forced marches, facing frostbite and starvation, and he thinks about his wife and their love so intensely that he's transported to a realm of the sublime... and reminisces about seeing her again... and she becomes nearly tangible to him even though intellectually he knows she's probably already dead... I lost it. It took me a couple tries to finish that passage.

Stories of resilience, overcoming, surpassing limitation and defying odds - these stories are abundant in the world, the vast majority of which go unrecorded in the pages of history. But I have yet to personally encounter one that speaks so poignantly and powerfully to will and faith overcoming any situation than Frank's dispassionate account of surviving the holocaust. The nazi concentration camp is is like humanity's laboratory for the most extreme and worst possible condition to test the human soul. His example, and others that he notes who didn't survive, highlight what is possible.

Interesting his naming of his therapy as "logotherapy." Meaning and its pursuit were at the core of the human enterprise in his findings. Humans could heal through the rediscovery of meaning. Even suffering, terrible suffering could be endured. As he said "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear with almost any 'how'.”

I included a quote from his book in something I wrote last year:

Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the tyrannical inmate.

That people can heal through the discovery of meaning, I think that this is what the Confederation gifts us, as does any system or entity that confers and uplifts perspective. Perspective is all that there is, offering suffering and freedom, and defining the contours of our identity.

99.5 Ra: As in all distortions, the source is the limit of the viewpoint.

Thanks FirstDistortion.