Short Self Discovery Quotes

When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could "wait" for everyone else who couldn't read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by "waiting" for people. And the only thing that I've ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me "Cinderella is a perfect example to be" but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I'm not waiting for anybody, anymore! I'm going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I'm not waiting for you anymore.

lots of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation. The truth is we all are travellers in the life's eternal journey, to meet for a short while,to care and share but we tend to forget that nothing lasts forever. if only we could cultivate a sense of detachment,life would have been much easier.

I mean, we’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are—as far as we know—the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness.

...in the lower self, love is neediness, “chemistry” or infatuation, possession, strong admiration, or even worship—in short, traditional romantic love. Many people who grew up in troubled homes and who experienced a stifling of their Child Within become stuck at these lower levels or ways of experiencing love.

In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is not, and making others what they are not.

Every problem has one immediate cause, many remote causes, long term and short term effects

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In

Gavin turned to leave, and I was right behind him so I could close the door when he walked out, but he stopped short and turned back around. I bumped straight into him, our faces close, too close, at this point. “I’ve missed you,” Gavin whispered.

The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self.

The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them -- a predilection not to be confused with the morbid brooding of the hypochondriac. As I have indicated above, I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing "occult" is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic, and the great disciplines that have taught me the practical usefulness of this viewpoint are psychotherapy and medical psychology. Probably in no other field do we have to reckon with so many unknown quantities, and nowhere else do we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why they work. Unexpected cures may arise from questionable therapies and unexpected failures from allegedly reliable methods. In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.

When the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, sometimes in only a few years, they are hailed by a new, often youthful, and always supremely self-confident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery in the financial and larger economic world. There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. (A Short History of Financial Euphoria, 1990)

The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size and heart rate.

You’ve encountered it, I’m sure: friends who are obsessed by the need to get their children’s (or their own) teeth straightened, their thighs sculpted, their breasts or their backyards professionally redesigned … They want the perfect career trajectory, the perfect holiday, the perfect pesto, the perfect latte, the perfect eyebrow, the perfect orgasm … They yearn for perfect politicians (ha!), perfect banks, perfect cars, perfect shoes, perfect kitchens … our new angst springs from the discovery that our lives are falling short of some crazy ideal of perfection clogging our minds like a cancer … Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.12

In Jesus, God deals with our bastardisations. The incarnation was the Creator's means of giving us a multisensory, no-holds-barred, tangible experience of the divine nature. God condescended to the limits of our means of knowing reality and truth. We struggle to put our flesh into words, but God's word--God's self-expression--became flesh and dwelled with us, for us. This is nothing short of an act of love, an act of revelation, and act of transferring the fullness of one's self into a vulnerable form so that it can be felt by another. God chooses to step into the range of our grasp, allowing our awareness of the divine to move from abstract imagination to relational discovery. Such a step certainly doesn't remove the mystery of who or what God is. Questions remain. But it does allow us to enter into that mystery with the whole of our beings. We don't have to stop being human to embrace the mystery of God. By God's invitation, we can poke our doubting and enquiring digits into the opened side of the incomprehensible made manifest. As we do so, we can know what God is like; God is like Jesus, and, to use Pastor Brian Zahnd's oft-quoted summary, God has *always* been like Jesus.

During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country, and my mother struggled to care for us, alone and with few provisions. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea. She began to spin wonderful stories about a crazy, adventurous frog named Antonica who would overcome great odds with her daring and creativity. Antonica helped us dream of freedom and possibilities. These exciting tales were reserved for mealtime. We ate until our bowls were empty, distracted from the bland food by the flavor of Antonica’s world. Mamina knew her children were well nourished, comforted, and prepared for the challenges and adventures to come. In 2007, I was preparing to host a TV show on a local station and was struggling with self-doubt. With encouragement and coaching from a friend, I finally realized that I had been preparing for this opportunity most of my life. All I needed was confidence in myself, the kind of confidence Antonica had taught me about, way back in Cuba. Through this process of self-discovery, the idea came to me to start cooking with my mother. We all loved my Mamina’s cooking, but I had never been interested in learning to cook like her. I began to write down her recipes and take pictures of her delicious food. I also started to write down the stories I had heard from my parents, of our lives in Cuba and coming to the United States. At some point I realized I had ninety recipes. This is a significant number to Cuban exiles, as there are ninety miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. A relatively short distance, but oh, so far! My effort to grow closer to my mother through cooking became another dream waiting to be fulfilled, through a book called 90 Miles 90 Recipes: My Journey to Understanding. My mother now seemed as significant as our journey to the United States. While learning how she orchestrated these flavors, I began to understand my mother as a woman with many gifts. Through cooking together, my appreciation for her has grown. I’ve come to realize why feeding everyone was so important to her. Nourishing the body is part of nurturing the soul. My mother is doing very poorly now. Most of my time in the last few months has been dedicated to caring for her. Though our book has not yet been published, it has already proven valuable. It has taught me about dreams from a different perspective—helping me recognize that the lives my sisters and I enjoy are the realization of my parents’ dream of freedom and opportunity for them, and especially for us.

The soul and mind are intrinsically connected; the soul transforms a portion of itself into the mind, the spiritual mind and other levels of reality. The soul uses the mind, to experience this realm, and becomes identified with it to create the ego. The souls bliss is always pure, and can never be touched by the negativity of the world it inhabits. It is our minds, it is our egos which have to be refined and purified in order for us to experience the ever new bliss of the soul. Our souls are already enlightened, that is why there is nothing really to gain or attain. We are already whole (holy), we just don't know it yet. We have so many negative beliefs eclipsing our divinity that we forget our true nature. Notice how I say eclipses? What is an eclipse? It is when the Moon covers up the great celestial light of our Sun for a short period of time. Similarly, the moon of the negative beliefs in the unconscious covers up the celestial light of our soul. But the light has never gone, it is still shining brightly, we just cant see it. Remove the moon of those limiting beliefs in order to perceive the bliss and light of your soul! Life is all about self-discovery. We have imposed this forgetfulness on ourselves for a reason, and it is all well and good in the grand scheme of things. When we do experience our awesomeness after so many years of limitation and negativity it makes it all worth it. The soul is unconditional love itself, and when you discover this within the very depth of your heart, ye shall know what God truly is

Elliott argues that enhancement technologies fascinate and aggravate us because they alert us to a contradiction in our national value system. On the one hand, America prizes success, and life here is organized around the heated pursuit of it. America is a democracy with a high degree of social mobility; we’re all searching for anything that might give us a competitive edge over our neighbors. (We are also, most likely, looking over our shoulders at whatever our neighbors might be using to get ahead, simultaneously judging them for using it, and wondering where we can get some ourselves.) On the other hand, Americans are also devoted to the idea of personal authenticity. We believe it’s important to be our “real” selves and are ever fearful of losing touch with our inmost natures in the push of worldly ambition. Self-discovery and self-actualization aren’t just enjoyable activities; they’re social demands. In America, Elliott believes, we tend to think of life as a never-ending process of figuring out “who we are” and then striving to live in such a way that we can enact the interests and proclivities that make us unique. This focus on the self as a guiding principle may partly stem from the secular nature of our society. In America since the late nineteenth century, Elliott writes, “finding yourself has replaced finding God.”29 Being who we really are is nothing short of a moral imperative—maybe the strongest one we modern Americans have. These two drives—on the one hand, to succeed; on the other hand, to be who you really are inside—often come into tension.

What is important to notice here is not the exact times or durations, as those will vary with each family, but rather the rhythm that is in place. There is a clear start to the day; a routine that is always followed, then educational time is started with circle time. The child understands that this first circle time marks the beginning of the instructional period. Clear breaks allow the child to transition from one activity to the next. By having a set number of activities before breaks such as snack time, your child begins to understand the concept of time. Eventually, this will become so second nature even to the youngest child that they will begin to transition by themselves. Allow for a range in flexibility in your routine. The exact minutes on the clock do not matter as much as the rhythm. If your child is losing interest in his or her self-directed activity ten minutes early, you may try to keep them interested a bit longer. However, it is acceptable to acknowledge that your child has gained all that they require from that lesson today and it is time to move on to the next phase. The same is true for extending activities. There is no need to interrupt a child that is engrossed in discovery. Simply let the interest and curiosity be satisfied in its own time and then carry on with the day. This is the beauty of Montessori home school, being able to tailor the experience to each child.

Dear Daughter, Self-discovery is essential for you. Until you know who you truly are, you will not know why you are alive.

Most of us are quite willing to embrace reality when it fits with how we see ourselves and the world, and when it is not overly unpleasant. However, when our life experiences confront us with things about ourselves that we are unwilling to accept, we call on psychological defense mechanisms to help maintain a sense of safety and stability. While these unconscious strategies help with short-term coping, they block long-term growth. This is because they distort reality. Ultimately, their function is to protect us from unpleasant truth.

Self-discovery is essential for you. Until you know who you truly are, you will not know why you are alive.

You are God‘s work of art, one of a kind and exceptional. You need to know and remember that at all times.

The Lonely, Deprived Child The most popular theory is one we often encounter in the treatment room. It’s the story of a child who grew up feeling conditionally loved based on performance. His parents may have expected him to be the best, instilling that to be anything short of perfect is to be flawed, inadequate, and unlovable. He may have been taught that love is tentative and contingent, or that his emotional needs would be met if he achieved greatness. His parents may have sought pride and attention through his achievements, implying a less-than-perfect performance would devastate them. This scenario may be complicated by different treatment from each parent. These children are often criticized by one parent while doted on, overprotected, or used as a surrogate spouse by the other. They may comply with their parents’ demands and expectations to receive attention and dodge criticism and shame. In response to this profound emotional deprivation, manipulation, and stifling of the precious and vulnerable little self, the child develops an attitude of I will need no one, No one is to be trusted, I will take care of myself, or I’ll show you. He was not loved for being himself, and was neither guided nor encouraged in the discovery of his true inclinations. He was not made to feel completely safe and unquestionably cherished by a caregiver. He was not shown how to walk in someone else’s shoes—how to feel the inner emotional life of another person. There was no role model for empathy and attunement. He was left with shame and a sense of defectiveness, both from the direct criticism and from the withholding of emotional nourishment and, often, physical affection. He was made to feel there was something wrong with him, as if wanting comfort, attention, and understanding were weaknesses. In defense, he mustered up whatever safeguards he could to extinguish the pain.

The most important psychological discovery of this century is the discovery of the “self-image.” Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and ill-defined to our conscious gaze. In fact, it may not be consciously recognizable at all. But it is there, complete down to the last detail. This self-image is our own conception of the “sort of person I am.” It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. From all these we mentally construct a “self” (or a picture of a self). Once an idea or a belief about ourselves goes into this picture, it becomes “true,” as far as we personally are concerned. We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true. This self-image becomes a golden key to living a better life because of two important discoveries: 1. All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will “act like” the sort of person you

When any art has once made this discovery, it has but a short space of time to live.

In the labyrinth of human experience, we often find ourselves running into walls. What we fail to realize is that these barriers are often self-constructed, built from our perceived flaws rather than our strengths. But have we ever stopped to ask, 'What do I actually like about myself?'. On our quest for self-discovery and personal growth, it's important to embark on a holistic journey that encompasses both self-appreciation and self-awareness. While reflecting on what we like about ourselves allows us to embrace our strengths and cultivate self-acceptance, it's equally valuable to acknowledge the aspects where we may fall short.

When the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, sometimes in only a few years, they are hailed by a new, often youthful, and always supremely self-confident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery in the financial and larger economic world. There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. (John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria [New York: Viking, 1990])

REVERSAL The reversal to mastery is to deny its existence or its importance, and therefore the need to strive for it in any way. But such a reversal can only lead to feelings of powerlessness and disappointment. This reversal leads to enslavement to what we shall call the false self. Your false self is the accumulation of all the voices you have internalized from other people—parents and friends who want you to conform to their ideas of what you should be like and what you should do, as well as societal pressures to adhere to certain values that can easily seduce you. It also includes the voice of your own ego, which constantly tries to protect you from unflattering truths. This self talks to you in clear words, and when it comes to mastery, it says things like, “Mastery is for the geniuses, the exceptionally talented, the freaks of nature. I was simply not born that way.” Or it says, “Mastery is ugly and immoral. It is for those who are ambitious and egotistical. Better to accept my lot in life and to work to help other people instead of enriching myself.” Or it might say, “Success is all luck. Those we call Masters are only people who were at the right place at the right time. I could easily be in their place if I had a lucky break.” Or it might also say, “To work for so long at something that requires so much pain and effort, why bother? Better to enjoy my short life and do what I can to get by.” As you must know by now, these voices do not speak the truth. Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desire that stirs you from within. Everyone has such inclinations. This desire within you is not motivated by egotism or sheer ambition for power, both of which are emotions that get in the way of mastery. It is instead a deep expression of something natural, something that marked you at birth as unique. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating yourself from your inclinations can only lead to pain and disappointment in the long run, and a sense that you have wasted something unique. This pain will beexpressed in bitterness and envy, and you will not recognize the true source of your depression.

Seeking pleasure leads to a life of escalating thrills, risky behaviour and short-term gratification of drives. Seeking happiness, by contrast, leads to long-term thinking, self-discovery, honesty, and consistent work to improve the situation of your life.

This is the central barrier to understanding evolution. We understand time through the experience of our own short lives. To truly imagine three and a half billion years is virtually impossible. Imagine yourself living to seventy-I mean really imagine seventy years: being born, a decade and a half of education, many more decades of employment, wars, elections, scientific discoveries, parents lost, middle age, old age-innumerable memories marked off by seventy birthdays and seventy summers and winters. Now try to imagine fifty million of those lifetimes-fifty million of them! Because that is how long life has been developing on earth. But how can you begin to conceive of such an expanse of time? Try this. If, at a modest clip-which I'd recommend, given what I'm proposing-it takes you a minute to count out loud to a hundred, it will take you almost a week of nonstop counting to reach a million. That is, counting without a single break and no sleep. If you could keep counting for twenty-four hours a day for 350 days, you'd reach fifty million. But these are not just meaningless numbers-each one of them represents a lifetime. But almost a year without sleep is inconceivable, so let's try and make it "doable", as Behe would say. Put in eight hours of counting a day, seven days a week. Take a two-week vacation each year. Under these still-harsh working conditions (no weekends off), it will now take you three years to count out these fifty million lifetimes. (You will reach, incidentally, the birth of Christ within the first half minute, and the oldest age of the earth, according to believers in a literal Genesis, within the first two minutes.) But to really comprehend this expanse of time, you would still have to be capable of imagining-as each of those numbers came tripping off your tongue, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year, for three years-that each of those numbers signified a lifetime. Even if you chose to do this, and even if you were capable of the extraordinary effort of will and imagination needed to conceive of what you were actually doing, I suspect that at the end of it you would still be only a little closer to comprehending the vast amount of time involved. In all probability, you would give up long before you finished, overwhelmed by depression at your own insignificance. It is offensive to one's sense of self to imagine this huge expanse of time that came before you and within which you had no relevance. No, it is more than offensive; it is terrifying. How much easier-and how much more comforting-to just put in those first two minutes and imagine, in one way or another, a designer who placed you at the center of it all.

wrote, “If a Huron’s soul could have inherited Montesquieu’s brain, Montesquieu would still create.” The native North American was an Enlightenment paradigm of the savage, yet if his soul were joined to Montesquieu’s brain, then one of the era’s greatest thinkers would, for intellectual purposes at least, be still alive. It did not matter that the soul and body were those of a “primitive,” provided the brain was the philosopher’s own. In short, the conviction that the brain is the only organ indispensable for personal identity emerged independently or, at most, marginally connected to empirical neuroscientific advances. Bonnet’s 1760 statement about Montesquieu and the Huron declares exactly the same thing as Puccetti’s aphorism of 1969, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person,” or Gazzaniga’s confident assertion of 2005, “you are your brain.” A good number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century (neuro)scientists and (neuro)philosophers claim that their convictions about the self are based on neuroscientific data. That may be so for them personally. Historically, however, things happened the other way around: Brainhood predated reliable neuroscientific discoveries and has all the appearance of having been a motivating factor of brain research. As it advanced, this research legitimized and reinforced the brainhood ideology.

In the early stages of enlightenment, the aspirant is overwhelmed by his discovery that God is within himself. It stirs his intensest feelings and excites his deepest thoughts. But, though he does not know it, those very feelings and thoughts still form part of his ego, albeit the highest part. So he still separates his being into two—self and Overself. Only in the later stages does he find that God not only is within himself but is himself.

But you might stumble upon yourself one day. You might suddenly stop short and see yourself in a completely new light.

The idea that one could find the truth in thought led not only to dogma, but also to science. In scientific thought, the correct thought is all that matters, both from the aspect of intellectual honesty, as well as from the aspect of the application of scientific thought to practice -that is, to technique. In short, paradoxical thought led to tolerance and an effort toward self-transformation. The Aristotelian stand-point led to dogma and science, to the Catholic Church, and to the discovery of atomic energy.