My dear mother often trotted out home-spun wisdom that I’m sure she picked up from her upbringing in the farmland of south-central Missouri. One of my favorites was, in reference to someone who obviously thought way too much of himself, “I wish I could buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth. I’d be a millionaire.” I stumbled across the 19th century novelist George Eliot’s version of this wisdom yesterday, “What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.”
None of us are exempt from this vanity and that is not necessarily a fault. “Tis just a human foible. Of course, occasionally someone like Donald Trump comes along and this “human foible” is magnified for us and we see how catastrophic it can be. It is important to have self-respect and even self-love in some sense. Failure to do so merely reflects what Carl Jung termed “ego deflation” which is an inverted form of “ego inflation.” Jung realized that with either extreme there was inordinate attention on our self and a lack of attention on other people and the world outside of our ego, that we probably saw only “the small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the darkness.” It is very humbling to suddenly realize, “Uh oh, this has pretty much been all about me so far in my life.”
“Self” consciousness or self-awareness is very challenging. It requires what spiritual teachers often call “soul work.” It entails looking within as well as without, the “within” dimension often requiring confronting what poet Ranier Rilke described as the heart’s “beastly little treasures.”
***************************************************************
ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running. Please check the other two out sometime. The three are:
https://wordpress.com/stats/day/literarylew.wordpress.com
https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com
https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com
literary lew 