Self-discovery

“ Little by little, A and B became less in evidence, until at length they were heard from no more, and C—the normal self—was left dominant, with a complete restoration to physical as well as mental health.
But, the reader may well ask, what does all this mean? Can there really be more than one self, one personality, in human beings? If so, [289] what are we? What is the true nature of man? ”

“ Cheers for Physics!—How many men are there who know how to observe? And among the few who do know,—how many observe themselves? "Everyone is furthest from himself"—all the "triers of the reins" know that to their discomfort; and the saying, "Know thyself," in the mouth of a God and spoken to man, is almost a mockery. But that the case of self-observation is so desperate, is attested best of all by the manner in which almost everybody talks of the nature of a moral action, that prompt, willing, convinced, loquacious manner, with its look, its smile, and its pleasing eagerness! ”

“ Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity, to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men. It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and expressed. ”

“ It is His will that we should strike a blow in defence of the house of our soul—the sanctuary of nationality.
Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice. There never was a nation so patriotic as the Jew. No city ever gripped a nation's heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew. No suffering, no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in the heart. ”

“ Thoughts are nearer, more akin to our personality than actions are, for they are primary expressions from personality, always preceding conscious speech and action. Of all the indices to our personality of which we have knowledge thoughts are the clearest; we are as our thoughts are. In compliance with that grand mandate, “Know Thyself,” why scan life’s page of speech and actions—shadows—when a vast volume of thoughts—realities—expressions of our personality, lies open to us for finding knowledge of self? ”

“ It is, of course, admitted that the self presents us with fresh matter, and with an increased complication. The point in debate is whether at the same time it supplies us with any key to the whole puzzle about reality. Does it give an experience by the help of which we can understand the way in which diversity is harmonized? Or, failing that, does it remove all necessity for such an understanding? ”

“ As to the question whether we ever again live on earth, it appears unlikely on this view that a given developed individual will appear again in unmodified form. If my present self is a fraction of a larger self, some other fraction of that larger self may readily be thought of as appearing,—to gain practical experience in the world of matter, and to return with developed character to the whole whence it sprang. ”

“ The fires of patriotism are dying low, and the love of country gives place to the love of party. There are mean victories rejoiced over, but they are the victories of the cynic and the sensualist. There is the sound of shouting, but it is the shouting over the triumph of one self-seeking politician over another self-seeking partisan. Saintliness, which other generations held in awe and reverence, provokes now a pitying smile. Mammon alone is held in high honour and sitteth in the high places. What is the will of God towards that nation? It is this—ruin and utter destruction. ”

“ Let us take this for granted then; but is this what we mean by self-realization? Is the conclusion that, in trying to realize, we try to realize some state of ourself, all that we are driving at? No, the self we try to realize is for us a whole, it is not a mere collection of states. ”

“ The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry gestures clinching his arguments.
"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour of humanity. It was death that made men of us. It was in the school of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and honour. There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by the world. ”

“ I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast between our “descriptive” knowledge of the physical world and our “appreciative” knowledge of the facts of finite life, is determined precisely by this difference between our social consciousness of what is “valid for all individuals” and our personal consciousness of what is valid for the Self. ”

“ This heart throbs violently and eternally with the thirst of self-knowledge, as though in it all those substances and forces of nature that have created the human personality as the highest expression of their complexity and wisdom aspired to clarify the meaning and aim of life. ”

“ When one thinks of these little islands floating in the western sea, of the power that has gone forth from them to heal and bless, of the vast multitudes to whom the King-Emperor is the symbol of justice and security—his is a poor heart which cannot feel the thrill of gratitude for citizenship in an Empire girdling the whole earth, whose foundations are thus laid in righteousness.
Patriotism is not, however, a mere sentiment. It was not sentiment which built up the Empire. It was self-sacrifice—the spirit that faced and endured death. For us, too, patriotism must be more than sentiment ”

“ In fact no one knows himself but that self's own soul. The vast and wonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosoms of its individual souls. To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not to some souls, but to all. ”

“ The development of your inner senses will enable you to do this.
16th. Inquire of the holy ones of the earth of the secrets they hold for you. The conquering of the desires of the outer senses will give you the right to do this.
And the final secret of all may be said to be wrapped up in the mystery of “self.” When the knowledge of the individualization of Being is reached, man has learned all that this world can teach him, and in the words “Know thyself” lie folded the ultimate possibilities of Humanity. Knowledge is indeed the supreme enlightener. ”

“ That accumulation of experience, that consciousness of identity which you possess as absolutely, uniquely your own; which none other can share with you in the remotest degree. "A thing we consider to be unconscious, an animal to be conscious, a person to be self-conscious." ”

“ The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power. And yet there must be some explanation of it. Why should a passion for righteousness be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified by a petty Roman official? There can be no explanation but this—that that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which wrought so evil a deed. That power was self-interest—selfishness. ”

“ My personal identity, therefore, implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. ”

“ The arrangement with which we habitually identify ourselves—what we call the normal or primary self—consists, in my view, of elements selected for us in the struggle for existence with special reference to the maintenance of ordinary physical needs, and is not necessarily superior in any other respect to the latent personalities which lie alongside of it—the fresh combinations of our personal elements which may be evoked by accident or design, in a variety to which we at present can assign no limit. ”

“ The foundations which the fathers laid in righteousness, through long neglect and decay are crumbling. An empire encircling the globe is tottering to destruction. The hay and the stubble cannot come scathless through the flames. The writing is on the wall, and as the eyes see the hand that writes, trembling seizeth upon men. And then there cometh a sudden change. The nation in a day rises out of the morass of its self-indulgence. It sets itself to lay hold again upon the eternal law of righteousness. ”

“ In what sense, despite this complexity and variability of the individual self-consciousness as it comes to us empirically, have we still a right to say that there is in the universe a real, and, within the range of our individual experience, a permanent being, to be called this individual Ego? ”

“ The elementary stage of knowledge is to make self, and self alone, thy study and thy world. Thou hast decided thine own career; thou hast renounced love; thou hast rejected wealth, fame, and the vulgar pomps of power. What, then, are all mankind to thee? To perfect thy faculties, and concentrate thy emotions, is henceforth thy only aim! ”

“ They were all individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each with his love and hope and fear. There was none among them so poor but some heart clung to them. They may die, no longer in units, but in broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual hearts still. ”

“ These moments of self-revelation come in the life of all of us, when our ordinary every-day self, familiar to ourselves and our home circle, is suddenly brought face to face with that other deeper lying and often semi-barbarous self, which crouches hidden beneath the veneer of civilization and the mask of social habit, and we are forced into a swift mental comparison of the two. ”

“ Our self, of which we talk so fluently, as one and the self-same—how far does it really possess the continuity and identity with which we credit it? Does it not rather seem to be an ideal which we gradually form and set before ourselves as the standard for measuring our attainments of the moment,—the perfect fulfilment of that oneness of being and purpose and knowledge which we never reach? ”

“ You want yourself, — the Self in its completeness, in its fulfilment, in its final expression. In brief, when you talk of reality, you talk of self-possession, of perfection, and of peace. And that is, therefore, all that you mean by the Being of the world or of any type of facts. Being therefore is nothing beyond yourself. You even now hold it within you, in your heart of hearts. Being therefore is just the purely immediate. To be means to quench thought in the presence of a final immediacy which completely satisfies all ideas. ”

“ Nor, if thy knowledge as to that which is within only extends so far, that when thou art hungry thou eatest, and when thou art angry thou attackest some one, wilt thou progress any further in this path, for the beasts are thy partners in this? But real self-knowledge consists in knowing the following things: What art thou in thyself, and from whence hast thou come? ”

“ But in those moments of self-questioning, when one does not lie even to oneself, I feel that I can say it is not so—that the real pleasure, the true sphere, lies in the feeling of self-development—in the sense of power and of growing ONENESS with the great spirit of abstract truth. ”

“ The known empirical facts of “multiple personality” possess nothing surprising for such a doctrine. The individual Human Self appears, in my account, as a part of the Selfhood of the race. Social intercommunication amongst Selves is explained as a phenomenal indication that they share in a common larger Selfhood. The phenomenal dependence of Mind upon Matter is interpreted as another sort of evidence whereby our personal participation in the various forms and stages of Selfhood that are present in Nature is indicated. ”

“ Rather, we must content ourselves with a certain number of the results of experience; some of these we will try, later on, to set before the reader.
The real secret of knowing human nature lies in possessing a pure heart innocent of self-conceit; such people gradually acquire a keenness of vision that pierces all the outer wrappings. ”

“ Es ist ein Selbstbewusstsein für ein Selbstbewusstsein. The idea 'I' is inseparable from the idea 'you.' I am I, on the whole, and in every definite aspect of my self-consciousness, in so far as I appeal to my fellow to recognize me. For example: I believe, and in believing conceive myself as demanding the approval of good judges. I esteem myself, and in doing so conceive myself as esteemed by others. ”

“ But the higher degree of self-recognition is that which, realizing its own spiritual nature, sees in all other forms, not so much the non-ego, or that which is not itself, as the alter-ego, or that which is itself in a different mode of expression. ”

“ The consciousness of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. ”

“ England, like most of the other countries in the world, is suffering from the over-extension of government and the decline of individual self-help. For six generations industry in England and America has flourished on individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially that was the recognised way of getting on. The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word "profiteer" had not yet been coined. ”