Self-knowledge

An important distinction between psychologizing and traditional self-knowledge:

To us, the phrase “self-knowledge” means little more than “psychologizing” about ourselves; that is, obtaining emotionally stimulating opinions about ourselves, against the background of the view of human nature insinuated into us by our own abnormal social order.

Or it means conceptual analysis, which cannot penetrate into our emotions and body because the faculty of thinking itself is encapsulated within us.  Thoughts about myself have no penetrating action upon the emotions and instincts.

Socratic self-knowledge is self-attention, which is a force that can exist and act with tremendous power within ourselves. For Socrates, it develops and grows in relationship to the various functions of the whole human structure, in the midst of the “citizens of Athens,” in “the marketplace.”

- Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy

One more from Jacob Needleman: Inner Empiricism

But what can the mind do with this deep participatory urge? Even at its most brilliant, the intellect alone can only ask questions that skim the surface of Eros; it cannot answer these questions. Yet such questions--the meaning of life, the nature of the soul--need to be answered. If intellect is not up to the job, how can we penetrate these mysteries? The solution, I'm proposing, is that we can only extend the reach of intellect through experience. There is a certain type of experience that opens up the mind, expands our consciousness, and allows us to approach answers to many of these fundamental questions.

In this sense, as a philosopher who cares about questions of the heart, I'm essentially a student of consciousness. I'm talking about certain kinds of experiences that we have spontaneously as human beings, but which are all too uncommon and which are not valued or understood within our culture. But when they are approached from another angle, one sees that these experiences really point to an aspect of the mind, of the psyche, beyond reason and intellect. And they do more than that: They also point to the object of those experiences, that is, to a fundamental reality. These experiences present us with an alternative or complementary way of knowing the world around us as well as the world inside us. The philosophical approach I'm talking about values these "questions of the heart" as invitations to experience, as well as to cogitations of the cerebral intellect. 

full article here

How to get free?

From an excellent interview with Professor Jacob Needleman:

How to get free? It’s hard to do, but in a way, it’s easy, if you know what it serves. Just to take a moment sometimes and let yourself step back from your own thoughts. I tried this with my students, and this is powerful.

One student who tried it — most of them sort of resisted it — when she got angry with somebody at a dry-cleaning place, and she said: “Oh, this is what Professor Needleman said! I’m going to look at my anger, look at my annoyance and step back from it.” And she was amazed that she became two people, the person who was angry and the other person who was calmly looking at her anger. And then when that happened, the anger itself subsided. Now, what she said after trying that stunned me. She said: “I had no idea my mind could do that.” Are we raising a nation, a culture, of people who don’t know this fundamental power of the human mind to step back from itself, to just look at itself? That power is the source of the beginning of the freedom from the ego. But we don’t value that as a culture. We value it when people get very so-called committed and passionate and are ready to strangle the other person. Do you see what I’m saying?

full interview here

What we are seeking

And what we are seeking is a body, a life on earth, in which our actions and behavior serve the higher impulses and intentions, the higher feelings, that constitute the heart of true human virtue. We are not simply searching for an improved version of moralist automatism nor for childish self-assertion masquerading as freedom. In a breathtakingly real sense, we are searching for a new kind of body, a body that has a new aim, a new purpose: voluntarily to serve the Good. And, to compound the mystery, in the search for a new kind of body within ourselves, there exists the possibility of discovering a new heart, source of love within ourselves that we have perhaps glimpsed within our lives, as in the legends where the seeker or the hunter has but one fleeting glimpse of a serenely beautiful face or a great winged being-a glimpse which, when understood, has the power to change entirely the direction of one’s life.

- Jacob Needleman, Excerpt from Why Can't We Be Good?

Results...

"Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call 'samsara' and which our Holy Bible calls 'dust'." - Jacob Needleman