Monday, February 28, 2011

conceit



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It is conceit that kills us 
and makes us cowards instead of gods. 
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Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal! 
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit. 
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Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves. 
And I am not interested to know about myself any more, 
I only entangle myself in the knowing. 
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Now let me be myself, 
now let me be myself, and flicker forth, 
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods. 
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~ D.H. Lawrence

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2 comments:

atloveisaplace said...

well, that is just wonderful.

Dean Keller said...

Seems to me, conceit, here, points us to the mechanism by which we simply replace one knowing for another "better" one, reconstructing the image of ourselves and continuing to bolster the sense of self. All this, leading again to a further "tangling" and more dissatisfaction. The process itself clarifying the desire to risk the nakedness of surrendering to the present and "be myself."