Knowing Yourself: 1500 Considerations

By Robert Peter Recktenwald Ph.D

Knowing Yourself takes an extended utilitarian look at the matter of connecting with ones authentic self. Thoughtful, stimulating, and occasionally surprising, it offers a wider and deeper perspective on self-discovery than normally encountered elsewhere, doing so in a provocative balanced way. The work consists of fifteen hundred newer ideas, all of which probably have not quite been seen in print before.
Based in part on fifteen years of research in philosophy, psychology, and comparative religion, and designed to entertain, encourage, enlighten, and constructively tease you, the project strives to be the most intellectually action-packed and potentially useful small volume related to self-knowledge ever.
Among the many topics considered are: the development of character, the truth about oneself, self-image, self-deception, hiding from oneself, vanities and follies, self-centeredness, self-control, self-reliance, needs, realizations, clear thinking, and making the most of oneself.
Through this work you will rightfully be able to regard yourself with new-and-better more perceptive greater appreciation. Its a book for self-improvers pleased with learning and with coming across occasional new insights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479752034

Robert Peter Recktenwald Ph.D

“Dr. Bob” Recktenwald received his Ph.D. from Brown University and has successfully taught at places of higher learning in North America and across Asia for over three decades. He has previously authored the book Listening Challenges in English (Tokyo: Newbury House/Shohakusha). His family and he live in southern Maine.

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Copyright © 2012 by Robert P. Recktenwald, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012921658

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4797-5202-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4797-5201-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4797-5203-4

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Contents

1   Overview

2   Positives

VIRTUES

GOODNESS

CHARACTER

3   One’s Better Self

OF REALITY

AUTHENTICITY

APPROACHING THE IDEAL

4   Paradoxes, Limitations and Constraints

ERRORS AND MISTAKES

SELF-DECEPTIONS

ILLUSIONS

FAULTY THINKING

5   Problem Approaches

VANITIES AND FOLLIES

FOLLY

EGOTISM AND SUCH

SELFISHNESS

EFFECTS OF

6   Self-betterment

SELF-MASTERY

INITIATORS

7   Realizations

RELATIONS

OBSERVATIONS

8   Advancing

CLEAR THINKING

KNOWING ONESELF

FINDING ONESELF

BEING ONESELF

MAXIMIZING

   for   Ana

Brian

Kiersta

Lewis

Linda

Olaf

Ronan

Sigrid

Sonia

1

Overview

1   We are here to be our most valuable.

2   If self-knowledge causes self-respect and self-respect engenders the self-discipline that brings about both virtue and achievement, then it follows that self-knowledge leads to virtue and achievement.

3   So as to be thoroughly true to oneself one really needs to know who and what one is.

4   Having self-knowledge amounts to being better advised.

5   In order to gain the major happiness of fully and freely being one’s own true self one first needs to be aware of who one is.

6   The more one knows oneself, the closer one can come to being all one can.

7   Self-knowledge proves useful as a means to self-improvement, to success, and to something like salvation.

8   Towards finding oneself is towards enlightenment; towards losing oneself is towards finding oneself; and towards knowing oneself is towards losing oneself.

9   Living the truth involves being oneself at one’s best, but in order to find out how to be, and then actually to be one’s thorough-going best, one first needs to know oneself.

10   For one to know the whole world except for oneself would be to suffer from great ignorance.

11   If there were no truth, then one could not know the truth about oneself, and if one could not know the truth about oneself, then one’s life would be that much the more instinctual.

12   Far better to be a controversial figure than to have no identity worth talking about.

13   In seeking to know oneself it helps to have a self quite worth knowing.

14   It would do no harm to be a mirror of one’s better self.

15   To sense one’s positive potential is to be invited to do something about it.

16   In order to encourage and realize anything like one’s own full potential, one first needs to know oneself, not only in terms of who and what one is, but also in terms of why one is the way one is and of how one should be behaving.

17   Generally speaking, one’s mission in life consists of living up to one’s personal potential greatness.

18   The more that we know ourselves the more freedom we have to be something like our finest.

19   If one knows oneself, one’s purpose, and one’s mission in life, then it becomes much easier to approach doing and being one’s best.

20   The wise seek knowledge because it facilitates one’s being even wiser; the good seek self-knowledge because it facilitates one’s being even better.

21   Know thyself would seem to be less a suggestion than it is a dare.

22   More often than not we are either what we let ourselves become or what we make of ourselves.

23   In our smallish but usually decisive part, we are what we allow the system and our own circumstances to form us into.

24   Through self-knowledge we can know more of our true worth, and by knowing our true worth we can more easily plan and bring about our self-improvement.

25   We may well be the shapers of our mortal destiny, but that all-too-mortal destiny, one has to admit, is somewhat limited in scope.

26   Escaping from reality still falls short of escaping from oneself.

27   One’s destiny can be redirected somewhat, and self-knowledge helps one do it.

28   The only factor holding one back from being all that one really can be under the circumstances is oneself.

29   If one wants to be the best one can, one needs a clear conscience, right principles, high standards and bright ideals—and then continually to put them all to work.

30   It is harder to know what one ought to want out of life if one doesn’t first know oneself.

31   Knowing with great precision what one is still doesn’t mean that one knows who one is.

32   Having self-knowledge makes it easier to be humble.

33   Properly truthful people are more modest than average, in part because they know who they are.

34   We are who we were—about to happen some more, and at the same time we are what our lives will have said we were and who we will have been.

35   At any given moment we get to decide what it is that we are about to have been.

36   To an appreciable extent one becomes what one has been thinking.

37   If one is really going to be true to oneself, one is first going to have to know what and who one actually is.

38   One’s entirely true self extends well beyond the self.

39   We’ll more likely become what we’ve truly meant ourselves to be.

40   Also a part of what we are is the atmosphere which we create with our lives.

41   One should not hesitate to protect oneself, to save oneself, or to improve oneself.

42   One might not want to cheat oneself out of self-improvement.

43   One’s serving much as a responsible parent would towards one’s less-than-mature self works that much the more good for one’s personal development.

44   The will to improve oneself usually needs first to be discovered, then to be focused on, and thereafter to be earned.

45   By means of knowing oneself, having good judgment, and being aware one can almost be wise.

46   Forewarned may be forearmed, that is, if one is alert enough and sage enough to recognize and to heed both useful information and good advice.

47   With enough rightful self-respect one can go far.

48   As a starting point, recognizing and accepting oneself as one is proves not a bad place to begin working on upgrading one’s self-respect.

49   Being true to oneself requires integrity of personality and an appropriate minimum of depending on others.

50   Consistently being one’s better self provides reliable cause for self-respect.

51   Self-respect involves accentuating the positive regarding the world and oneself.

52   What one can do especially well for the common good is, when done, appropriate cause for self-respect.

53   Being oneself alone is more an ideal for the self-centered than for the self-respecting.

54   Self-respect makes it unnecessary and irrelevant for anyone to plash about in self-love.

55   In order to respect oneself one needs, among other things, humbly to agree with oneself.

56   Working at justifiably enhancing one’s self-concept adds to one’s self-respect.

57   Succeeding as a result of competing mostly with oneself is good cause for self-respect.

58   One may be worth what one thinks one is worth, but perhaps so only to oneself.

59   The better that one knows