Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
We know how gradually the infant acquires a mastery of its sensuous experience; and it is likely that for a long time after it has obtained command of its single experiences it remains unaware of its selfhood. In a classic passage of "In Memoriam" Tennyson has stated the case with that blending of witchery and scientific precision of which he alone among the poets seems capable:
But it is recorded that he would lift no veils from the Other-worlds. "If you do not understand life," said he, "how can you understand death?" Well; we who are stranded here, each on his desert island of selfhood, thrust out after knowledge: peer for signs at all the horizons; are eager to inquire, and avid of the Unknown which also we imagine to be something outside of our own being.
When the Self, breaking through this first illusion, begins to see and feel itself in the finer body, to find selfhood there, then the states of consciousness of the finer body come into being; or, to speak exactly, the finer body and its states of consciousness arise and grow together. But the Self must not dwell permanently there.
As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality of the natural world, in order that it might give itself to you, and your possession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender of selfhood, next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last by a union of love; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of that same process, you are to mount up to higher unions still.
At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity: the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together.
The eyes of those who did not hesitate nor compute looked into her eyes, not appraising, not questioning, but mild and unafraid. The voices of free people spoke in her ears and the laughter of happy hearts, unthoughtful of sin or shame, released from the hard bondage of selfhood. For these people, though many, were one. Each spoke to the other as to himself, without reservation or subterfuge.
The stimulus to grow, the forces and the tendencies that make for growth, all come from within ourselves. Yet it is only to a limited extent that they come under our direct control. So, too, the goal of growth, the ideal perfection of our nature, is our own; and yet on the way to it we must needs outgrow ourselves. What part do we play in this mighty drama? The mystery of selfhood is unfathomable.
And do not fail to remember, that he, who, even though self-impelled, goes out from the shelter of his selfhood into the presence of the great congregation, incurs a Loss which no praise can make good, encounters a Fate against which no appreciation is a shield, invokes a Shadow in which the mens conscia recti is the only resource, and the knowledge of shadows dispelled the only consolation. Mr.
The mistake lies in making a separation between interest and self, and supposing that the latter is the end to which interest in objects and acts and others is a mere means. In fact, self and interest are two names for the same fact; the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals and measures the quality of selfhood which exists.
The act is not complete until the sense of loss has disappeared. Yet while I hold that self-sacrifice is thus the very extreme of rationality, grounding as it does all worth in the relational or conjunct selfhood, I cannot disguise from myself that it contains an element of tragedy too.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking