New Philosopher, Sense of Self, Matthew Beard

The considered life – in which we take back authorship of our narratives – gives some structure to that self-image and resists its distortion by others. It is not to deny our weaknesses by developing an unrealistic faith in strengths we don’t possess. Witness any number of TV talent-show hopefuls who, after dispatching their tuneless misadventure i

asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

A considered life also informs and improves that otherwise fickle thing: our self-image. We don’t pay much conscious attention to the mental picture we carry around of ourselves, but it dictates so much of how we feel about our strengths and weaknesses. It’s part of the story we tell ourselves about how we are and how we are likely to behave in any

These two realms of knowing—knowledge and self-knowledge—are not different varieties of the same stuff but are opposites. And they are bound by a delicate balance: the more our knowledge grows, the more our self-knowledge needs to grow. If that doesn’t happen—if the roots of our self-knowledge don’t deepen to support the growth of our knowledge—the

It accords with a different sense of self, affirmed not by enclosing more and more of the world within the confines of me and mine, but by developing and deepening relationships with others.

For example, he stated that the self as center must become the spiritus rector of daily life.1 Moreover, the experience of the self is almost impossible to practically distinguish from the experience of “what has always been referred to as ‘God.’”2 The experience of the self is from the perspective of the ego an experience of the Divine that presen