Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

"I spent many years trying to become conscious, but all that effort led merely to self-consciousness, which in turn generated guilt, anxiety, and ambition. I was told that higher consciousness was a worthy goal and that its opposite, unconsciousness, was the result of laziness and ignorance. Around the age of fifty my ideals and values began to change, so much so that many of them turned upside down and inside out. Now I see great value in laziness, understood as giving up both effort and the attempt to justify my life. I have come to appreciate the teaching I have found in many religions that praises holy ignorance. And I have been discovering how to live with little consciousness"Emerson once remarked that it is advisable to live without consciousness of the workings of the body, and I wonder if the same recommendation applies to the whole of life. Perhaps in some ways we do have to become conscious, and that may be the proper work of the first half of life. But then all our education and learning experiences may fade, not into oblivion, where they are simply lost, but by a process of absorption into us, so that they become us or we become them."from Original SelfIt's easy today to lose the deep, direct, and vivid sense of living with passion and originality. Thomas Moore states in his preface that we are "chronically trying to be someone other than this original self, persuaded that we areMoore, Thomas is the author of 'Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality' with ISBN 9780060195427 and ISBN 0060195428.