Perennial Phil Ch 9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE [4,1139] a very negative Ego.view of self.

Perenial Phil Ch 9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE [4,1139]

In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice.

Boethius [a Roman senator]

VICE may be defined as a course of behaviour consented to by the will and having results which are bad, 

primarily because they are God-eclipsing and, 

secondarily, because they are physically or psychologically harmful to the agent or his fellows.

 Ignorance of self is something that answers to this description. In its origins it is voluntary; for by introspection and by listening to other people's judgments of our character we can all, if we so desire, come to a very shrewd understand­ing of our flaws and weaknesses and the real, as opposed to the avowed and advertised, motives of our actions. 

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. 

As for the consequences of such ignorance, these are bad by every cri­terion, from the utilitarian to the transcendental. 

Bad because self-ignorance leads to unrealistic behaviour and so causes every kind of trouble for everyone concerned; 

and bad because, without self-knowledge, there can be no true humility, therefore no effective self-naughting 자책 , therefore no unitive knowledge of the divine Ground underlying the self and ordinarily eclipsed by it.

    
The importance, the indispensable necessity, of self-know­ledge has been stressed by the saints and doctors of every one of the great religious traditions. 

To us in the West, the most familiar voice is that of Socrates. More systematically than Socrates the Indian exponents of the Perennial Philosophy harped on the same theme. 185

There is, for example, the Buddha, whose discourse on 'The Setting-Up of Mindlness'expounds (with that positively inexorable exhaustiveness characteristic of the Pali scriptures) the whole art of self-knowledge in all its branches—knowledge of one's body, one's senses, one's feelings, one's thoughts. 

This art of self-knowledge is prac­tised with two aims in view. 

1] The proximate aim is that 'a brother, as to the body, continues so to look upon the body, that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, having overcome both the hankering and dejection common in the world. 

2] And in the same way as to feelings, thoughts and ideas, he so looks upon each that he remains ardent, self-possessed and mindful, without hankering or dejection."  

Beyond and through this desirable psychological condition lies the final end of man, knowledge of that which underlies the individualised self. 

IN their own vovabulary, Christian writers expressthe same ideas.

A man has many skins in himself, coering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard, cover the soul. 

Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Eckhart

Fools regard themselves as awake now--so personal is their knowledge. It may be as a prince or it may he as a herdsman, but so cock-sure of themselves!

Chuang Tu

This metaphor of waking from dreams recurs again and again in the various expositions of the Perennial Philosophy. In this context liberation might be defined as the process of waking up out of the nonsense, nightmares and illusory plea­sures of what is ordinarily called real life into the awareness of eternity. 

The 'sober certainty of waking bliss'—that won­derful phrase in which Milton described the experience of the noblest kind of music—comes, I suppose, about as near as words can get to enlightenment and deliverance. 187

Thou (the human being) art that which is not. I am that I am. If thou perceivest this truth in thy soul, never shall the enemy deceive thee; thou shalt escape all his snares.

St. Catherine of Siena

Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are and whither we are going. We come from God and we are in exile; and it is because our potency of affection tends towards God that we are aware of this state of exile.

Ruysbroeck

Spiritual progress is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality. 

(Such knowledge, of course, is worthless if it is merely theo­retical; to be effective, it must be realized as an immediate, intuitive experience and appropriately acted upon.) 

Of one great master of the spiritual life Professor Etienne Gilson writes: 

'The displacement of fear by Charity by way of the practice of humility—in that consists the whole of St. Ber­nard's ascesis, its beginning, its development and its term.' 

Fear, worry, anxiety—these form the central core of indi­vidualized selfhood. 

Fear cannot be got rid of by personal effort, 

but only by the ego's absorption in a cause greater than its own interests.

 Absorption in any cause will rid the mind of some of its fears; 

but only absorption in the loving and know­ing of the divine Ground can rid it of all fear. 

For when the cause is less than the highest, the sense of fear and anxiety is transferred from the self to the cause —as when heroic self-sacrifice for a loved individual or institution is accompanied by anxiety in regard to that for which the sacrifice is made. 

Whereas if the sacrifice is made for God, and for others for God's sake, there can be no fear or abiding anxiety, since nothing can be a menace to the divine Ground and even fail­ure and disaster are to be accepted as being in accord with the divine will. 

In few men and women is the love of God intense enough to cast out this projected fear and anxiety for cherished persons and institutions. i88 

The reason is to be sought in the fact that few men and women are humble enough to be capable of loving as they should. And they lack the necessary humility because they are without the fully realized knowledge of their own personal nothingness.

Humility does not consist in hiding our talents and virtues, in thinking ourselves worse and more ordinary than we are, but in possessing a clear knowledge of all that is lacking in us and in not exalting ourselves for that which we have, seeing that God has freely given it us and that, with all His gifts, we are still of infinitely little importance.

Lacordaire

===

As the light grows, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing from our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. But we must be neither amazed nor disturbed. We are not worse than we were; on the con­trary, we are better. But while our faults diminish, the light we see them by waxes brighter, and we are filled with horror.

So long as there is no sign of cure, we are unaware of the depth of our disease; we are in a state of blind presumption and hardness, the prey of self-delusion. While we go with the stream, we are unconscious of its rapid course; but when we begin to stem it ever so little, it makes itself felt.

Fénelon

===

My daughter, build yourself two cells.

First a real cell, so that you do not run about much and talk, unless it is needful, or you can do it out of love for your neighbour.

Next build yourself a spiritual cell, which you can always take with you, and that is the cell of true self-knowledge;

you will find there the knowledge of God's goodness to you.

Here there are really two cells in one, and if you live in one you must also live in the other; otherwise the soul will either despair or be presumptuous. If you dwelt in self-knowledge alone, you would despair; if you dwelt in the knowledge of God alone, you would be tempted to presump­tion. One must go with the other, and thus you will reach perfection.189

Sr. Catherine of Siena