If I know myself

The core virtue is humility. If I know myself, I am humble. If I don’t, I am ignorant; I will hold false ideas about myself. At the extremes, I will either be under-inflated and suicidal or over-inflated and megalomaniacal. Humility, self-knowing, is wisdom. Wisdom is our depth dimension. If I do not know myself, I am disabled. I cannot love. If I know the world without knowing myself, I am a technician. Life, then, is a calculation. This is where we are today. Our knowledge of the world has vastly outstripped our knowledge of ourselves. No man who knows himself could ever build a bomb. Or pretend to lead a country.    

The Shift

The Shift is underway when we begin to pay less attention to the outer world and more attention to the inner one. It’s a crucial movement. Ignorance of Self exacts a terrible toll.

Ignorance unlimited

Thanks to technology the limits of our ignorance have been vastly extended.

Socratic paradox

The ignorant man is ignorant of the fact that he’s ignorant. The wise man knows that he doesn’t know. And he’s comfortable with that.

The full catastrophe

The real calamity is not that we die but that we are born. There is no school of truth. We are fated to find out the hard way that life has no opposite.