As long as we take ourselves as ego, we can glimpse Soul only fleetingly and always as "out there". We are left longing for more and turned in the wrong direction to get it. Yet without ego there will be no appearance at all, nothing to awaken us to the Beauty of our own unknown Selfhood beyond the self we take ourselves to be. With exquisite understanding and great literary skill, Lavelle takes us deep into a meditation on this existential dilemma -- showing us which self to forget, and which to "know" in the Socratic sense. He shows us how to awaken to our "genius" beyond ego, the intimate living-wholeness that unites us with Reality's ongoing transcendence of ourselves both without and within. It is not possible to overemphasise the importance of the spiritual and moral implications he draws out for how to recognise our vocation and participate fully in community. A masterpiece.