I disagree with this one. Listening to yourself is not as good a way to have new insights as listening to other people.
He says,
We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor;
and concludes that the alternative is to get news by listening to yourself. Actually, newspapers and neighbors are better sources of new information than yourself; and observing the external world can be even better.
The notion is not that information “from yourself” has useful content, but that it has some special spiritual value attached to it. This could be parsed out in a meaningful way to be talking about maintaining personality integrity (say, just for instance, by reducing conflicts between your beliefs). But I have a prior around .95 that says that when you hear someone talking about your “inward life”, they’re talking religion.
I debated whether to post this, considering the likelihood he was talking about mystic goodness of self, but I feel the core content is important, regardless of its “hidden meanings.”
We did have an entire series on luminosity (contrast with “inward life”), many other articles on self-examination techniques, and we shy away from gossip and politics, which most certainly were the news articles of the day to which he referred.
I disagree with this one. Listening to yourself is not as good a way to have new insights as listening to other people.
He says,
and concludes that the alternative is to get news by listening to yourself. Actually, newspapers and neighbors are better sources of new information than yourself; and observing the external world can be even better.
The notion is not that information “from yourself” has useful content, but that it has some special spiritual value attached to it. This could be parsed out in a meaningful way to be talking about maintaining personality integrity (say, just for instance, by reducing conflicts between your beliefs). But I have a prior around .95 that says that when you hear someone talking about your “inward life”, they’re talking religion.
I debated whether to post this, considering the likelihood he was talking about mystic goodness of self, but I feel the core content is important, regardless of its “hidden meanings.”
We did have an entire series on luminosity (contrast with “inward life”), many other articles on self-examination techniques, and we shy away from gossip and politics, which most certainly were the news articles of the day to which he referred.