Self-knowledge (n.) is denied to us. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of the independent and isolated ego.
Self-knowledge (n.) is what we are behind the mask of the separate, independent, isolated ego.
Self-knowledge (n.) makes a person less willing to define his nature, and more astounded at how unpredictably he can feel.
Self-knowledge (n.) in the Indian sense is discovering what I am when no role or conventional definition of a person holds me any longer.
Self-knowledge (n.) deepens the stranger the form in which man learns to recognize himself — the Delphic maxim reversed: know the universe and the gods, and thou shalt know thyself.
Self-knowledge (n.) sought by grasping makes a man insecure, just as holding one's breath suffocates him.
Self-knowledge (n.) must be felt as truly impossible, not shrugged off; whoever merely dismisses the problem never knows it.
Self-knowledge (n.) quickly showed the ancients that nature's brute forces have their counterparts in the soul, which is not a simple unit but a pantheon of gods and demons.
Self-knowledge (n.) happens only when no separate mind stands aside to watch; there is simply the flow of thought, and the mind really knows itself.