“To place a person in a system takes less energy than to know him in his own right, since in the former instance, all that has to be perceived is that one abstracted characteristic which indicates his belongingness in a class…What is stressed in rubricizing is the category in which the person belongs, of which he is a sample, not the person as such…”
A. Maslow – Toward A Psychology of Being
A rubric is a class or category and here Maslow expands the word to become an act of categorizing or….rubricizing. It takes courage and freedom from the need to be in total control of all unfolding details to avoid rubricizing anyone in the mutual discovery process of truly intimately knowing someone. There must be a protracted and sometimes even painful time of allowing “evidence” to build up over and over again in order to show even just a glimpse of the landscape of one soul. We don’t get there by categorizing, do we? We get there by a state of “being withness” that does not insist on capturing and concluding. This is how we stay perpetually alert, alive and ready to know and be known in love.
jruthkelly
J. Ruth Kelly 
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