The Self

“If I love myself
I love you.
If I love you
I love myself.” ― Jalaluddin Rumi

We cannot have deep and enduring satisfaction, happiness, or joy unless we have self-respect. There is good reason to believe that self-respect is the basis for all higher morality. We cannot have self-respect unless our lives are an earnest attempt to express the finest and most enduring values which we are able to appreciate. That is to say, unless we come into close and right relationships with our fellow-men, with nature, and with Truth (or God), we cannot achieve full self-respect. ― Richard Gregg, The Value of Voluntary Simplicity

The excerpt from Tomas Tranströmer’s work poetically explores the concept of self-discovery and understanding. The “two truths” metaphorically represent internal and external perspectives. The “inside” truth can be interpreted as one’s self-awareness, emotions, thoughts, and subconscious—the intrinsic part of our being. The “outside” truth, on the other hand, may refer to the external reality, the world around us, and the way others perceive us or the situations we are in.

Where these two perspectives meet, Tranströmer suggests, is the point at which we gain a true sense of self. It’s a moment of introspection that can reveal deep insights about who we are. This convergence can be a moment of clarity, where the inner world of thoughts and feelings aligns with the outer world of experiences and actions, providing a fuller, more rounded understanding of oneself.

This concept resonates with the idea that personal growth and self-knowledge come from the interaction between our personal experiences and the broader, external environment. It reminds us that self-awareness is not just an inward journey but also a reflective process shaped by our interactions with the world.

― #genAI/chatgpt

• “Getting in touch with the self involves more than analysis. The self is not a mental construct but a bodily phenomenon. To be in touch with oneself means to sense and be in touch with one’s feelings. To know one’s feelings, one has to experience them in their full intensity and that can only be done by expressing them. If the expression of a feeling is blocked or inhibited, the feeling is either suppressed or diminished. It is one thing to talk about fear, another to feel the fright and scream. Saying “l am angry” is not the same thing as feeling the emotion surge through one’s body. To truly feel one’s sadness one has to cry.” —Alexander Lowen, Narcissism: Denial of the True Self
• It is inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. ― Clarice Lispector
• Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves. —Tomas Tranströmer
• Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing ― with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. - Alan Watts
• “The prison door of self is never closed, but very few wish to walk through it. The chains that confine us in Plato’s cave are not locked, but very few are aware of their captive status.” ― Jed McKenna
• “Those who have slipped their chains may be more effectively confined yet, thinking themselves free merely because their cell is larger and others are less free. Thinking themselves free, they don’t seek freedom. They are content in their captivity.” ― Jed McKenna

Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher said, “If you’re going to escape from prison, the first thing you must appreciate is that you are in one.”

If you think you are free, you can’t escape – do you hear that predicament? It’s a bizarre one. - Ram Dass

• “If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.” ― George Gurdjieff
• “It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act.” ― Aldous Huxley
• “The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative.” ― Aldous Huxley
• “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.” ― Aldous Huxley
• “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” ― Rosa Luxemburg
• “The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.” ― Sri Aurobindo
• “Do you see now how you are in a prison created by the beliefs and traditions of your society and culture and by the ideas, prejudices, attachments and fears of your past experiences?” ― Anthony de Mello
• “What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it…That’s the difference.” ― Anthony de Mello
• “As long as the mind clings to belief, it is held in a prison.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
• “Belief is a shelter, a prison for a curious mind.” ― Debasish Mridha
• “A mind enclosed in language is in prison.” ― Simone Weil
• “In some very important senses, a prisoner can be more free than a prison guard when you take into account our internal dimension.” ― Raoul Martinez
• “‘You are so proud of your intelligence,’ said the master. ‘You are like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.’” ― Anthony de Mello
• “Can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions? The unaware life, it is said, is not worth living. It cannot even be called life; it is a mechanical, robot existence; a sleep, an unconsciousness, a death; and yet this is what people call human life!” ― Anthony de Mello
• “There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human.” ― Carl Jung
• “Unless we pass through all the moments of the spirit’s history in our present, we will not know who we are, will not be conscious of subjective spirit-that is, of our present cultural possibilities.” ― Robert N. Bellah, [Religion in Human Evolution]
• “William Butler Yeats wrote, six days before his death: “I know for certain that my time will not be long … I am happy and I think full of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.” ― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution
• “When there is a self, self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self to witness, there is no witnessing either. It is all very simple; it is the presence of the person that complicates.” ― Nisargadatta Maharaj
• “Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I’d like to see you be or do. I have no desire to forsee you, only to discover you. You can’t disappoint me.” ― Mary Haskell
• “When there is true awakening, all the sense of ‘being’ disappears. Even the sense that you are the Self, also dissolves.” ― Siddharameshwar Maharaj
• Whatever attitudes we habitually use toward ourselves, we will use on others, and whatever attitudes we habitually use toward others, we will use on ourselves. ― Henepola Gunaratana
• “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.” ― Albert Einstein
• Abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such or so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. ― Nisargadatta
• “Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.” ― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
• “How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the “real” alternatives that can be known only in the doing.” ― Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
• “Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.” ― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
• “One who looks around him is intelligent, one who looks within him is wise.” ― Matshona Dhliwayo”
• “We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.” ― Sheryl Sandberg
• When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Only when one is connected to one’s own core is. ― Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• “As a Wanderer, you must be true to yourself. You cannot continue to follow the crowd.” ― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
• “The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift—your true self—is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.” — Bill Plotkin
• “At some point the interest in the nature of ‘I’ eclipses all other interests. It is like falling in love with truth or reality … Why did I develop this love of truth? I just found myself at an early age passionately interested in these matters.” — Rupert Spira
• “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” ― C.S. Lewis

… To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others… .

— David Whyte

• If you persist in throttling your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms. You will be able to say with perfect sincerity: “I don’t know what I want in life. – HENRY MILLER, Sexus
• To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

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