Quotes About Self

To own one's own shadow is to reach a holy place—an inner center—not attainable in any other way. To fail this is to fail one's own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.

The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world it is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.

mythology describes the hero's battle with his internal self as the encounter with the dragon, and modern man has no fewer dragon battles than did his medieval counterpart

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — not mind, not self, not doing, not existence, even not non-existence.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself," Spencer Brown once noted. The emergence of the neurosomatic, neurogenetic and metaprogramming circuits is the universe's way of "seeing itself" ever more clearly and totally, to decide where it is going.

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you forget the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think I am always a weakling, quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.

But, if we have a variety of potential selves rather than the one block-like essential self of Aristotelian philosophy, and, if each self acts as an observer who creates a reality-tunnel which appears as a whole universe (to those unaware of Transactional and Quantum Psychology), then: Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one self' to another, the whole world around us appears to change also.

Quantum Mechanics says an electron has a different essence every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no essence at all). Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different self than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no essence at all).

Robert Anton Wilson helped me realize that not all doors lead outward. The best ones, the ones that lead to the most exciting and uncharted places, are within. And no one in this world can withhold the key that unlocks those doors from us.

In pre-ethological terms, the emotional-territorial circuit is what we usually call "ego." Ego is simply the mammalian recognition of one's status in the pack; it is a "role" as sociologists say, a single brain circuit which mistakes itself for the whole Self, the entire brain-mind apparatus. The "egotist" behaves like "a two year old," in the common saying, because Ego is the imprint of the toddling and toilet-training stage.

It is not nonsense. We are merely confronting infinity where we least expected to encounter it — in our own lonely selves.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

Dr. Walker develops a mathematical model of this non-local Self and uses the model to derive predictions about how often the alleged psychokinesis of parapsychologists can occur. His results correlate with the scores made by persons very successful in psychokinesis experiments. In other words, people rated good at controlling the fall of dice, because they score above chance, score on the average only as far above chance at the non-local Hidden Variable model says they can.

Colin Wilson argues that when we say, Life is boring and meaningless, it means that we are boring and meaningless. Can there be any truth in this?

I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.

What I must do concerns me, not what people think.' 

While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both … While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

it was his choice. To be a witness, to observe, to let the events be recorded within himself on some personal film in some secret compartment no one knew about, except him.

Humor. I am my own best audience. Meryl

I could give all to Time except -- except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There, And what I would not part with I have kept.