Self-Knowledge (Essay Books)

There are three key moves a good friend would typically make that can provide a model for what we should, with a new commitment to self-love, be doing with ourselves in our own heads. Firstly, a good friend likes you pretty much as you are already. Any suggestion they make, or ambition they have about how you could change, builds on a background of

Honourable self-love is not selfishness: it’s the feeling of correctly respecting ourselves.

We are sad about particular things, but confronting them would be so arduous that we generalise and universalise the sadness. We don’t say that X or Y has made us sad; we say that everything is terrible and everyone is awful. We spread the pain in order that its particular, specific causes can no longer be the focus of attention. To put it metaphor

Too much of social existence requires an excessive degree of stoicism from us. There are heavy incentives for us not to feel or notice our pains. Eventually, this unacknowledged distress may sink our entire characters into depression.

We term it Philosophical Meditation, a practice with the premise that a decisive share of the trouble in our minds comes from thoughts and feelings that have not been untangled, examined and confronted with sufficient attention. Philosophical Meditation needs a time of the day when nothing much will be expected of us. We might be in bed or on the s

The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalisation of the voice of people who were once outside us.

The outcome of any concerted attempt at self-knowledge could be presumed to be a deep understanding of ourselves. But strangely, the real outcome is rather different. It appears that the more closely we explore our minds, the more we start to see how many tricks these organs can play on us – and therefore the more we will appreciate how often we ar

We don’t need people to be perfect; we simply need them to be able to explain the greater part of their inherited imperfections calmly and in good time, before we are enmeshed in the sufferings they can otherwise cause us.

Afflicted by a lack of self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood.