worldview and perspective on Self-Consciousness

The fascination with silence took root early in the life of composer John Cage. In 1928, during a speech contest at Los Angeles High School, he argued for the establishment of a national day of quiet....

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Seco...

The final mystery is oneself.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

When Freud says…that consciousness is the tip of the mental iceberg, he was short of the mark by quite a bit-it may be more the size of a snowball on top of that iceberg. The mind operates most effici...

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determinin...

Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God; know him and you will also love him.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self'...

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

Without the binding force of memory, experience would be splintered into as many fragments as there are moments in life. Without the mental time travel provided by memory, we would have no awareness o...

Psychologists have estimated that we have anywhere between twelve thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day. The majority of those—as high as 80 percent—are thought to be negative: obsessing about mi...

The insight that we can exercise some control over our thoughts and feelings is deep in Christianity.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

We think our problem is with God, but remember, God is perfect. Our problem is really with ourselves.

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” Long before we are criticizing others, the ...

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.

The person striving for superiority is “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others ​and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgm...