1 result for (book:notp AND session:779 AND stemmed:yourself)
[... 9 paragraphs ...]
Almost any question that you can ask about God, with a capital, can be legitimately asked of the psyche as well. It seems to you that you know yourself, but that you take the existence of your psyche on faith. At best, it often seems that you are all that you know of your psyche, and you will complain that you do not know yourself to begin with. When you say: “I want to find myself,” you usually take it for granted that there is a completed, done, finished version of yourself that you have mislaid somewhere. When you think of finding God, you often think in the same terms.
Now you are “around yourself” all of the time. You are ever becoming yourself. In a manner of speaking you are “composed” of those patterns of yourself that are everywhere coming together. You cannot help but be yourself. Biologically, mentally, and spiritually you are marked as apart from all others, and no cloak of conventionality can ever hide that unutterable uniqueness. You cannot help but be yourself, then.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
When you ask: “What is my psyche, or my soul, or who am I?” you are seeking of course for your own meaning as apart from what you already know about yourself. In that context, God is as known and as unknown as you are to yourself. Both God and the psyche are constantly expanding — unutterable, and always becoming.
You will question, most likely, “Becoming what?” for to you it usually seems that all motion tends toward a state of completion of one kind or another. You think, therefore, in terms of becoming perfect, or becoming free. The word “becoming” by itself seems to leave you up in the air, so to speak, suspended without definitions. If I say: “You are becoming what you already are,” then my remark sounds meaningless, for if you already are, how can you become what is already accomplished? In larger terms, however, what you are is always vaster than your knowledge of yourself, for in physical life you cannot keep up with your own psychological and psychic activity.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
You think that your own consciousness is the only logical culmination of your body’s reality. You read yourself in a certain accepted fashion. In the “entire book of life,” however, just physically speaking, there are interrelationships on adjacent levels that you do not perceive, as other portions of your own biological consciousness or biological language relate to the entire living fabric of the world. In physical terms you are alive because of substructures — psychic, spiritual, and biological — of which you have hardly any comprehension at all.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]
(Long pause at 10:47.) When you ask: “Who am I?” you are trying to read yourself as if you were a simple sentence already written. Instead, you write yourself as you go along. The sentence that you recognize is only one of many probable variations. You and no other choose which experiences you want to actualize. You do this as spontaneously as you speak words. You take it for granted that a sentence begun will be finished. You are in the midst of speaking yourself. The speaking, which is your life, seems to happen by itself, since you are not aware of keeping yourself alive. Your heart beats whether or not you understand anatomy.
(Long pause at 10:55.) Give us a moment… You read yourself in too-narrow terms. Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality. You fight pain because you have not learned to transcend it, or rather to use it. You do not trust the natural consciousness of the body, so that when its end nears — and such an end is inevitable — you do not trust the signals that the body gives, that are meant to free you.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]