> ## Content Index
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> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Our Need for Self-Knowledge
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/our-need-for-self-knowledge/
- Published: 2023-06-21T04:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-03-17T22:37:09.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Flourishing, Briefly

> One of man's deepest needs is the need for identity. We need to know who we are; we need to exist in our own eyes and other people's. That need for identity is so strong that it can lead to aberrations \[an over-active left hemisphere giving us delusions about ourselves\]. 

[Jacques Philippe, *Interior Freedom* (Scepter), 120](https://scepterpublishers.org/collections/fr-jacques-philippe/products/interior-freedom?ref=thedailyeudemon.com).

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> Only by exploring the sub-conscious and understanding it a little bit can we actually improve ourselves over time. The mistake is to think that thinking can override it all. 

Lex Fridman Podcast, #393, Andrew Huberman: Relationships, Drama, Betrayal, Sex, and Love (8/17/2023). Start at 20:30, discussing Paul Conti. (Huberman, btw, will be releasing a four-part series with Paul Conti about exploring your sub-conscious.) Mental health; how to explore the self; how to explore one's sub-conscious without a therapist. For those who can't find a spiritual adviser, you may want to check it out. I will be. 

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> The left hemisphere, as you may well be able to predict by now, has higher self-esteem than the right. It is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its own limitations.

> Our implicit motives are derived from deep, unconscious, affect-laden experience, whereas motives we attribute to ourselves are cognitively elaborated constructs.

> According to David McClelland, who developed the influential Achievement Motivation Theory, implicit motives are a right-hemispheric phenomenon and explicit motives are left-hemispheric.

> All in all, the left hemisphere just is not reliable about the self.

> And since, in a sense, the self is all we know directly, that’s got to be a handicap.

McGilchrist, [*The Matter with Things*](https://amzn.to/3KKaP6n?ref=thedailyeudemon.com), Chp. 4\. 

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"It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are, and even then you might be wrong. And that's something I don't want to be wrong about." Sheriff Bell. (Cormac McCarthy, *No Country for Old Men*, Chp. 7)

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