Sublime

We may call this a limit-situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of self, had been taken away.

the key is to find a good balance between the individual and the group, between individual creativity and productive co-operation.

Murdoch believed that one of the core projects that each of us needs to undertake is to “unself”. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

For Murdoch, there is no backstage self. As long as we

The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent h

He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul; so he left his nature in London on the station platform, and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage. How he could explain to this ardent boy that no, he didn’t want to get coffee, and sit together on the train; that yes, he was aware of the various places

But what both deep meditation and psychedelic experiences teach us is the ability to see how much of that self—that ego—is constructed.

In this story, self-knowledge is the precondition for satisfaction. And then, in this same culture, we are also encouraged to believe, by psychoanalysis, that such recognition of what we need and want, were it possible, would be something we couldn’t tolerate;