Self-Knowledge -

The School of Life

TSOL Press

2017

55 páginas

1h 50m

ISBN-10: B075ZYZNJ1

In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘Know yourself’. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and what our priorities and potential might be.

Resenhas (2)

5 (Perfeito)

Self-Knowledge

When difficult feelings threaten to emerge, the light of consciousness can be counted upon to take fright and shine its beam elsewhere. By failing to investigate the recesses of the mind, we carefully protect our self-image and can continue to think well of ourselves. However, we don’t escape from the job of introspection lightly. There is almost always a high price to pay for our reluctance to look within. Feelings and desires that have not been examined tend not to leave us alone; they linger and spread their energy randomly to neighbouring issues. Ambition that doesn’t know itself comes out as anxiety. Envy comes out as bitterness; anger turns into rage; sadness evolves into depression. Disavowed material buckles and strains the system. We develop pernicious tics; a facial twitch, impotence, an incapacity to work, alcoholism, a porn compulsion. Most so-called ‘addictions’ are at heart symptoms of insistent difficult feelings that we haven’t found a way to address. Insomnia is revenge for thoughts we have refused to have in the day.

It is no coincidence that Socrates should have boiled down the entire wisdom of philosophy to one simple command: Know Yourself. This is a distinctly odd-sounding ambition. Society has no shortage of people and organisations offering to guide us around distant continents, but very few that will help us with the arguably far more important task of travelling around the byways of our own minds. Fortunately, however, there are a number of tools and practices that can help us to reach inside our minds and move us from dangerous vagueness to challenging but redeeming clarity.

There is another approach to consider, not based on Eastern thought, but on ideas that have come down to us from the Western philosophical tradition. 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 sofa, alone with a notepad and pen. Key to the practice are three well-angled questions: – What am I presently anxious about? – What am I presently upset about? – What am I presently excited about?

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. Only by being listened to can anxieties be drained of some of their intensity.

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

Exercise: Interpreting Anxiety
Write down what you are anxious about; find at least eight things. Each entry should only be a single word (or just a few words) at this point. Don’t worry if some of the anxieties look either incredibly trivial or tragi-comically large. If you’re having trouble, search for things that may be anxiety-inducing under the following categories: – Work – Relationships – Children/Parents – Health – Money – Things I have to do Feel the curious release that can come from just making a list of these items. Huge relief can now come from what we call ‘unpacking’ an anxiety. There are two kinds of unpacking we might do around any given anxiety. 1. Practical unpacking Walk yourself through the practical challenge. Ask the following questions: – What steps do you need to take? – What do others need to do? – What needs to happen when? It is very useful to have a calm and sympathetic part of yourself (or a friend) listening in on the detailed description of what needs to be done to address an issue. It is no longer merely an anxiety; it is a set of steps. They might not all be easy, but at least you are clearer about what they are. 2. Emotional unpacking Talk yourself through an emotional challenge or set of doubts. Describe the feeling in more detail. What do you feel it points to? Imagine trying to piece it together for a very considerate friend. The aim here isn’t to solve all anxieties; it’s to start to get to know them and to experience the relief that comes from this.

We are ready to turn to the second guiding enquiry behind the Philosophical Meditation: What am I presently upset about? This could sound odd, because we may have no particular sense of being upset about anything. But the claim here is that we are almost always likely to be upset about something, for the simple reason that we are far more vulnerable than we think and that life constantly places us in the line of fire of little arrows fired by people around us.

We should, in introspecting, be maximally indulgent with ourselves as a corrective to our normal tendency to be a bit brutal and to insist that we’re getting worked up about nothing – when all along, our pain requires a hearing.

The premise here is that there are always some very good reasons why we are sad; it’s just that we haven’t allowed ourselves to feel them, because we labour under unfair assumptions about what it is right and normal to feel sad about.

Exercise: Interpreting Upset As quickly as you can, and without bothering how petty, unreasonable or pretentious it might sound, write a list of current upsets. The more the better. How have others hurt you? What are you sad, nostalgic or wounded about? Allow yourself in the present safety of this exercise to be, for instance, furious about the way your partner brushes their teeth (too lackadaisical or too smug); the agents of global politics; your boss saying ‘yeah, right’ in a slightly sarcastic manner; the hotel receptionist who implied you might not be very well off, or your mother commenting on your taste in shoes. These are just starting points and all are valid. Now ask yourself: If this had happened to a friend, how would you advise them? What might you say? Again, we’re not attempting to resolve these issues as yet. The primary, crucial issue is to be clear about what is actually distressing us. We’re allowing our troubles to acknowledge themselves.

There is a third question we should consider within a Philosophical Meditation: what am I presently excited about? Our minds are prone to become clogged up by unexamined sources of excitement that can, once they are decoded, point the way to important changes we might want to make in our lives.

Anything that arouses our curiosity or yields a certain pleasure is providing data – in a slightly illegible form – about something important missing or in short supply in our lives. We should pause to acknowledge the direction we are being inarticulately but perhaps wisely pointed towards.

Exercise: Interpreting Excitement Rapidly list several things that have caught your attention and excited your interest since the last Meditation. A word or a brief phrase is sufficient for now. Your list might include: – Moments of envy – Daydreams: ideas about how life might ideally be – How nice someone or something was Pass these through a sieve of further questions: – Describe your excitement as if to a sympathetic, interested friend. – If you could realistically change your life in certain ways, what would it be to change in the light of this? – This exciting thing holds a clue to what is missing in your life; what might that be? – If this thing could talk, what might it tell you? – If this thing could try to change your life, what changes might it advise?

Philosophical Meditation does not magically solve problems, but it may help hugely in creating an occasion when we can identify our thoughts and get them in some kind of order. Fears, resentments and hopes become easier to name. We become less scared of the contents of our own minds; we grow calmer, less resentful and clearer about our direction in life. We start, at last, to know ourselves a little better.

Self-love is at the core of answering the riddle of who we are emotionally. It is this quality that determines the extent to which a person feels warmly towards themselves, can forgive and accept who they are, and is able to remain steadfast in the face of opposition and reversals. Evidence of our degree of self-love emerges particularly clearly around the threats posed to us by other people. When we meet a stranger who has things that we don’t (a better job, a nicer partner, etc.), when self-love is low, we may quickly feel ourselves worthless and pitiful. Or, if our levels of self-love are more substantial, we may remain assured by the decency of what we already have and who we are. When another person frustrates or humiliates us, we may be able to let the insult go and even shrug it off, confident in our right to exist, or we may we need to enforce respect from others, remaining brooding and devastated, cut to the core of our being by a few unkind words. When we are faced with a need to risk making a fool of ourselves, we may feel the danger to be far too great, or we might be able to withstand the disapproval of others due to a sufficient degree of internal ballast.

The strength and nature of our self-love can be tracked with particular clarity within relationships. When a love affair isn’t working for us (perhaps because we’re getting hurt or ignored), do we have enough self-love to leave it quickly? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve from close relationships? In a different vein, when in love, how good are we at apologising for things that may be our fault? If we have sizeable reserves of self-love, we might feel we can afford to admit mistakes and still believe in our basic decency. Yet if our self-love is very fragile, no admission of guilt or error is ever possible; it would sap the last of our limited self-regard. We become very brittle to be around.

Our Emotional Identity is further brought into focus by looking at our communicative styles. Can we put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalise pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it onto innocents with counterproductive rage? When other people upset us, do we feel it is OK to communicate our internal state? Do we feel we have the right to let others understand us? Are we sulkers?

It is symptomatic of the way our minds work that we cannot directly ask ourselves who we are in terms of Emotional Identity. We need to ask ourselves smaller questions and answer them without pausing too long, thereby attempting to bypass our rationalising filters. Then we need to wheel back and sift through our answers to assemble a plausible picture of who we might be emotionally.

Emotional Identity Questionnaire Give a score to each of the statements below, on a scale from 1 to 5: 1 = That’s not true. 2 = That’s not very true, but there’s a glimmer of recognition. 3 = I don’t know – maybe, maybe not. 4 = A bit true, but I have a few reservations. 5 = Yes, that’s true. Self-Love 1. If people knew who I really was deep down, they would be shocked. 2. It can be embarrassing to ask where the bathroom is. 3. In relationships, it can feel pretty disturbing when someone you like starts to like you back. 4. I sometimes feel a bit disgusting. 5. When people approve of you, a lot of it comes down to what you’ve managed to achieve. Candour 1. People tend to think too much. 2. I’m not a jealous person 3. I’m basically very sane. 4. I don’t mind feedback in theory, but most of what I’ve received has been really off the mark. 5. There’s far too much ‘psychobabble’ around these days.
Communication 1. People you’re close to should be naturally good at understanding how you feel in a lot of areas. 2. When I feel misunderstood, I need to be alone. 3. I’m not a good teacher. 4. I sulk every now and then. 5. People rarely ‘get it’ when you’re trying to explain. Trust 1. It’s not going to be OK in the end. 2. I worry about my health. 3. Civilisation is pretty fragile. 4. When someone is late, I sometimes wonder if they might have died. 5. If you don’t watch them closely, people will try to swindle you.

Count up your scores in each category. The lower the score, the more you have of each quality. The higher the score, the less you have of Self-Love, Candour, Communicative skill and Trust.

irrespective of the financial and status details of our families, we all have another significant legacy to grapple with, in that each of us is the recipient of an emotional inheritance, largely unknown to us, yet enormously influential in determining our day-to-day behaviour, and normally in rather negative or complex directions. We need to understand the details of our Emotional Inheritance a little before we are able to ruin our own and others’ lives by acting upon its often antiquated and troublesome dynamics.

Psychotherapists have developed a special term to capture what we inherit emotionally from the past: they call it our ‘transference’. In their view, each of us is constantly at risk of ‘transferring’ patterns of behaviour and feeling from the past to a present that doesn’t realistically call for it.

Maturity involves accepting with good grace that we are involved in multiple transferences, along with a commitment to try to disentangle them rationally. The job of growing up means realising with due humility the exaggerated dynamics we may constantly bring to situations and to monitor ourselves more accurately and more critically so as to improve our capacity to judge and act in the here and now with greater fairness and neutrality. The idea is to grow a little wiser as to where our troubles come from and around what areas of our lives we need to be especially careful.

Emotional
Inheritance
Questionnaire Our Emotional Identities have a history; they are an Emotional Inheritance from our families. Knowing more about our Emotional Inheritance enables us to watch out for peculiar behaviour, feel sympathy for ourselves, explain ourselves to others and, in small ways, change. Consider the inherited, familial aspects of the central pillars of your Emotional Identity: Self-Love – Did you feel loved? – How much of who you really are were you allowed to be? – Were you allowed to fail? – Were you made to feel guilty and ashamed? How? – How was the ‘bad’ side of you received? Candour – Did you have to be very normal? – Did people around you admit to being afraid and sad? – Did it matter what people thought? Communication – Did people communicate patiently and clearly with you? – Were you allowed to tell others how you really felt? Trust – Were the people around you confident about the world? – Did they panic acutely? – Did they lose their temper regularly? – How worried were they about your health? Probe gently. Be sympathetic. If you get stuck, be patient. Each answer might be a novel, or at least a short story.

The truth will out. And when we don’t let it emerge, it has a tendency to reveal itself through involuntary (often physical) symptoms. We become insomniac or impotent, an eyelid starts twitching, we acquire a stutter, we scream in our sleep, we lose energy, we fall into depression….

Exercise:
An Experiment
in Honesty Consider our list of defensive, self-deceiving moves:
• Distraction or addiction
• Manic cheeriness
• Irritability
• Denigration
• Censoriousness
• Defensiveness
• Cynicism or despair

We all practise them all the time. Can you remember specific incidents in your life when you employed them as strategies? What were you trying to hide from yourself? It can help if this exercise happens in a group, because the enemy of such an effort is often the sense that we’re all alone. The solution is always the normalisation of the disavowed parts of ourselves.

Exercise:
An Audit of Our Inner Voice
We can catch the sound of what our inner voice is like when we prompt ourselves to finish certain sentences: – When I do something stupid, I usually tell myself... – When I succeed, I usually tell myself... – When I’m feeling lazy, my inner voice says... – When I think of what I want sexually, my inner voice says... – When I get angry with someone, my inner voice says... Does the inner judge strike you as kindly or punitive? Whose outer voice became your inner voice in the context of each question?

It may feel tempting to say that we shouldn’t judge ourselves at all. We should simply approve and love. But a good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge; someone who needs to separate good from bad but who can be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves; rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves.