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Self-knowledge
When I don't know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you.  The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one's own self. Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. Peace comes within the souls of men when they realize their oneness with the universe. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. In cultivating our own experience, we begin the process of acting as guides for ourselves and each other. By struggling with ambiguity and contradictory impulses, we fan the flames of individual gifts and instincts. It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient too. All behavior consists of opposites. Learn to see things backward, inside out, and upside down. To know ourselves means to know our relationship with the world — not only to the world of ideas and people, but with nature, with the things we possess. That is, our life — life being relationship to the whole. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. We must become the change we seek in the world. Just as the physicists of earlier decades realized they could not describe the world/object as separate from the observer/subject, so too must we find the resolution of our relationships through discovering ourselves rather than trying to control. There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected. We don't see things the way they are. We see things the way we are. May we open to a deeper understanding and a genuine love and caring for the multitude of faces who are none other than ourself. To discover the mind of another human being or one's own requires the risk of opening oneself up to the unfamiliar, the unexpected, which is often felt to be threatening. In the process something breaks and gives way: an eggshell. That is the price of birth and growth. There is only one history of importance and it is the history of what you once believed in and the history of what you came to believe in. Being, not doing, is my first joy. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark. If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. He who knows others is clever; He who knows himself has discernment. There are two ways of meeting difficulties: You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them. The self-controlled soul, who moves amongst sense objects, free from either attachment or repulsion, he wins eternal Peace. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. Fear grows out of the things we think; it lives in our minds. Compassion grows out of the things we are, and lives in our hearts. Better than power over all the earth, better than going to heaven and better than dominion over the worlds is the joy of the man who enters the river of life that leads to Non-Being. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly ... spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know how to be himself. When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. One's own thought is one's world. What a person thinks is what he becomes. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. The great scholars of the age split hairs in all the sciences. They have gained total knowledge and complete mastery of things that have nothing to do with them. But that which is important and closer to him than anything else, namely his own self, this your great scholar does not know. A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back — it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. |
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