In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.
The illusion of selfhood, ego, a separate identity is false.
. . . (I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.
Whoever lacks the initiative to read books stifles his own selfhood.
To have the illusion of selfhood simply means that when you look in the mirror, you see somebody.
There is no point in being a responsible member of society, nor is there any point in being an irresponsible member of society. Both are very defined descriptions of selfhood
Freedom is the moment between sleep and waking before selfhood and the world return.
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
To master the pride of defiant selfhood, that in truth is the highest bliss.
What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.
He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.
Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.
