If you want to remember yourself, the best thing is not to think about yourself. As long as you think about yourself, you will not remember yourself.
Interpretation
To truly understand yourself, focus on others instead of fixating on your own identity.
This quote by P.D. Ouspensky suggests that self-awareness is attained when we shift our attention from self-obsession to the world around us. By engaging with others and recognizing the importance of external relationships and experiences, we can gain a deeper understanding of our true selves, moving beyond the constraints of our individual thoughts and perceptions.
In practice
In a personal development workshop focused on mindfulness, this quote could encourage participants to reflect on their interactions with others.
I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him.
Can one alter oneΒ΄s chief feature?" asked someone else. First it is necessary to know it. If you know it, much will depend on the quality of your knowing. If you know it well, then it is possible to change it.
People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.
We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.
You can understand other people only as much as you understand yourself and only on the level of your own being. This means you can judge other people's knowledge but you cannot judge their being. You can see in them only as much as you have in yourself. But people always make the mistake of thinking they can judge other people's being. In reality, if they wish to meet and understand people of a higher development than themselves they must work with the aim of changing their being.
When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him. So long as a man is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself.
When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong.
The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. / That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.
This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
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