Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Self-Knowledge
    Self-Knowledge
    Self-Knowledge
    Ebook68 pages50 minutes

    Self-Knowledge

    By The School of Life

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A practical guide to knowing yourself.

    Socrates summed up all philosophical commandments with one directive: "Know yourself." Self-knowledge informs not only our identity, but how we make decisions in life, work, and love. Society has no shortage of people and organizations offering to guide us to distant places, but very few will help us with the far more important task of traveling around the byways of our own minds. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with the tools we need in order to fully understand our characters. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and how to fulfill our true potential.


    • EXPLORES THE LIFE-CHANGING POWER OF UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
    • A PRACTICAL TOOLKIT for self-discovery.
    • INCLUDES THOUGHT-PROVOKING EXERCISES for self-analysis.
    • THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S MOST POPULAR SUBJECT the associated YouTube video "Who Am I?" has 1.5 million views.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateJul 16, 2020
    ISBN9781999747152
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

    Read more from The School Of Life

    Related to Self-Knowledge

    Related ebooks

    Self-Management For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Truth

      Dec 16, 2020

      The Truth
      6 min read

    • Article

      Self-Compassion

      Mar 1, 2024

      Self-Compassion
      5 min read

    • Article

      It is Okay to Not Be Okay

      Jun 30, 2021

      It is Okay to Not Be Okay
      6 min read

    • Article

      Vex King

      Mar 3, 2021

      Vex King
      2 min read

    • Article

      Medicalising Emotions

      Aug 14, 2019

      Medicalising Emotions
      9 min read

    • Article

      Don’t Pull the Trigger

      Nov 19, 2019

      Don’t Pull the Trigger
      4 min read

    • Article

      Creative Spiritual Living

      Sep 17, 2020

      Creative Spiritual Living
      4 min read

    • Article

      How To Be Serene

      Oct 23, 2019

      How To Be Serene
      4 min read

    • Article

      Break The Chains Of Thought

      Jan 21, 2020

      WE ARE ALL CITIZENS of the Information Age, when attention-consuming data is abundant and human attention itself is regarded as a scarce commodity. In the noise and chaos of this flood of information, how often do you notice where your mind is and wh

      5 min read

    • Article

      Transforming Fear Into Hope

      May 23, 2022

      Transforming Fear Into Hope
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Right Way To Think Positive

      Aug 10, 2019

      The Right Way To Think Positive
      6 min read

    • Article

      Being Human

      Mar 1, 2024

      Being Human
      5 min read

    • Article

      Yoga For Forgiveness

      Jan 15, 2023

      Yoga For Forgiveness
      8 min read

    • Article

      Your Beautiful Monsters

      Jan 24, 2023

      Your Beautiful Monsters
      10 min read

    • Article

      Trust Your Intuition

      Mar 15, 2024

      Trust Your Intuition
      3 min read

    • Article

      How to Quiet Your Mind Chatter

      Mar 10, 2021

      We’ve all been there. Stuck in our own heads, fixated on a two-minute conversation from three days ago. We replay it over and over. I shouldn’t have snapped at Dad. He was always so patient when I was growing up. We get stuck. The voice in our heads

      7 min read

    • Article

      Unleash Your Expression

      Oct 10, 2018

      Words JESSICA LEE Humans are inherently creative beings with a desire to create, innovate and inspire. Yet many people don’t engage with their creative side because fear gets in the way. The truth is it takes courage to create. At the heart of any cr

      7 min read

    • Article

      I Am Enough

      Dec 28, 2023

      I Am Enough
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Charm Offensive

      Jun 17, 2021

      The Charm Offensive
      4 min read

    • Article

      What Death Can Teach Us

      Oct 30, 2017

      Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart. In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death”. There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Self-Knowledge

    4.5/5

    20 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Pretty good. May be a great kick-starter of one's self-awareness. Yet the book is short and vague.
    • 5/5
      Please can you send me the book at Gmail :
      chaimaeboualy20@gmail.com
      I really need it ?

    Book preview

    Self-Knowledge - The School of Life

    I

    Self-Ignorance

    One of the most striking features of our minds is how little we understand them. Although we inhabit ourselves, we seldom manage to make sense of more than a fraction of who we are. It can be easier to master the dynamics of another planet than to grasp what is at play in the folds of our own brains.

    Instances of self-ignorance regularly surprise and perturb us: on certain days, we can be irritable or sad without any idea why. Or we may feel lost in our career, but be unable to say more than that we wish to ‘do something creative’ or ‘help to make the world a better place’ – plans so vague that they leave us vulnerable to the more robust plans of others.

    It has been the achievement of psychology to instil in us a sense of a basic division between two parts of the mind: the conscious and the unconscious; between what is immediately accessible to us and what lies in shadow, and will surprise us in symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue and diffuse anxieties, longings and fears. It has also been the work of psychology to insist that maturity must involve a constant drive to turn what is unconscious conscious; to help us master the art of self-knowledge.

    Illustration

    We need not blame ourselves for our poor grasp of our own minds. The problem is inherent in the very architecture of the brain, an organ that evolved over millennia for the sake of rapid, instinctive decision-making – not the patient, introspective sifting of ideas and emotions.

    However, a degree of emotional squeamishness is also responsible for our failure to look inside. A lot of what is unconscious is tricky material that we shy away from looking at too closely. For example, we may feel troublingly angry towards people we thought we loved. We may be more ruthless and envious than nice people are ever meant to be. We may have to make enormous changes to our lives, but prefer the ease of the status quo. Across childhood, we may have had instilled in us, so subtly we didn’t even notice, strong notions about what are normal and not normal things to experience. Traditionally, boys were not allowed to acknowledge that they felt like crying, and girls weren’t allowed to entertain certain kinds of ambitions for fear of being unladylike.

    We might not have such obviously naive prohibitions today, but other, equally powerful, ones may have taken their place. We may have picked up covert but forceful indications that no decent person (no-one loved by their parents, at least) could be unable to cope at work, be tempted by an affair, or still be upset over a break-up that took place three years ago. Most of our sexual desires still have no place in our standard understanding of respectability.

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1