You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed.

Understanding comes through awareness. Can we, then, approach our experience — our sensations, feelings, and thoughts — quite simply, as if we had never known them before, and, without prejudice, look at what's going on?

Almost more common is the sensitive boy who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.