So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You.
Thanks to this re-collective act, you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of correspondences with the world of normal men, and hungers for communion with a spiritual universe.
And this thing so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it, you recognize as the true Self whose existence you always took for granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in its scattered manifestations.
This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at its summit d we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the pathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in the comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth.
True and complete self-knowledge, indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone. Few can bear to contemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange and terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake.
The life of the seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and most drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude toward himself and all other things. pp29-30
Likely enough, if you really know yourself – saw your own dim character, perpetually a t the mercy of its environment;your true motives,
The very mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet you have not: wealth, honor, success, social position, love, friendship. comfort, amusement.
You feel that you have a right to some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a certain immunity form failure or humiliation.
You resent anything which opposes you in these matters. You become restless when you see other selves more skilful in the game of acquisition than yourself. You hold tight against all comers your own share of the spoils.
You are rather inclined to shirk boring responsibilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil; are greedy of pleasure and excitement, devoted to the art of having a good time.
These dispositions, so ordinary that they almost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers the Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust.
p35
DaimonNotes 