In a scene from the beautiful film Coach Carter (2005), Timo Cruz delivers a powerful monologue about our human flight from freedom and from our own inner power.

The monologue itself comes from a passage by the contemporary writer Marianne Williamson, whose underlying source in turn is the distinguished twentieth-century psychologist Abraham Maslow and the theory he called the Jonah Complex.

Drawing on the story of the prophet Jonah, Maslow uses this archetype to formulate the problem of “our human fear of freedom and of accepting responsibility for our own power,” a subject I address in a short text that follows.

Below you can also find an approximate Persian rendering of this monologue and of Williamson’s words. Because the original English passage is already present in the source, it is preserved here exactly:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.