Self-Knowledge (Essay Books)

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.

recognising a feeling doesn’t mean you follow it to a conclusion.

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.

Ideally, we would build up a storehouse of knowledge of what exactly we had inherited (and from whom); a kind of emotional family tree that would show us, and others, the issues that had been transferred across generations and were liable to disrupt our lives today.

During our meditative session, we need to give all our anxieties a chance to understand themselves, for three-quarters of our agitation is not that there are things to worry about, but that we haven’t given our worries the time they require to be understood and defused.

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

Our overall nervousness declines when our anxieties are systematically laid out and examined.

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

The walnut is extremely bad at understanding why it is having certain thoughts and ideas. It tends to attribute them to objective conditions out in the world, rather than seeing that they might be stemming from the impact of the body upon the mind. It doesn’t typically notice the role that levels of sleep, sugar, hormones and other physiological fa