"Know Thyself": A User's Guide

The Profound

“...man must find his own Soul.”
- Chandogya Upanishad

Knowing The Big Questions

Knowing yourself means digging in to The Big Questions:

What’s it all about?
Who am I?
What am I?
Where did I come from (origin)?
Where am I going (destiny)?
How should I live?
What’s the point?
What is sacred?
What the heck is going on?

(There are other Big Ones, but that’s a good enough taste for now.)

But now this leads us to another question: does “knowing yourself” mean fully answering the Big Questions?

That’s another good question.

And a tall order.

To briefly dig in to this, let’s go to something Gabriel Marcel talked about: the difference between a “problem” and a “mystery.”

1+1 is a problem.

It can be solved. It comes to an end. It’s settled, resolved, done, complete. It’s convergent, in that there’s one right answer, and only one, and once you find that, you’re finished.

A mystery, on the other hand, doesn’t work like that.

It’s more open-ended. It’s less structured. It’s not contained: it spills over into lots of other areas, and might suck lots of seemingly unrelated factors and fields into its rumblings and workings. It’s divergent, in that there are lots of possible answers. There may not be only one right answer. In fact, there might be several right answers. Or, there might be none. Or there might be a right answer for one person that’s wrong for another (like medicine). Or maybe the problem was formulated incorrectly in the first place.

Of course, none of this means that “all answers are right,” or “anything goes,” or anything along those lines. Some answers can be clearly wrong or inaccurate or incomplete.

This also doesn’t mean that mysteries never get solved. Clearly, some mysteries do get solved. Otherwise we could fire all our detectives, artists, and scientists.

It gets messy.

That makes it interesting.

Just because it’s messy and difficult doesn’t mean we can’t, or shouldn’t tackle it, or that we could even avoid it if we wanted to.

It’s like “a problem that encroaches on its own data,” where the detective becomes part of the case, the reporter becomes part of the story, the interrogator discovers that he or she is tied up intimately in the answers and facts of the case they uncover.

It’s like the snake that winds up biting its own butt. (Ouroboros, to use the fancy medical jargon.) The objective becomes subjective, which becomes objective again, and so on.

It’s like the problems we run into in physics and anthropology and psychology experiments where the act of simply observing conditions changes those conditions. We have to observe them – we can’t know conditions without observing them – yet observing them changes the conditions.

These aren’t problems that can get solved by a detached, objective, impartial judge who stands back at a distance, fully removed from the situation.

These get personal.

“Figuring out what to eat for dinner” is a problem. “Falling in love” is a mystery.

Mysteries are better. They’re way more fun.

They’re the stuff of grand adventures. They underlie all great stories. (All stories, in a way, are really explorations of these questions.)

All of these Big Questions are mysteries.

Perhaps the job of each of us is to solve those mysteries, for ourselves, on a personal level, in the best possible way.

But to come back to where we started: does knowing yourself really mean “solving” these mysteries?

Good question.

Some problems can’t be solved, they can only be transcended.

Einstein said it well: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Which mean, to get out of certain questions, we need to change our level of thinking.

This might mean throwing everything we’ve got into it.

Rilke said it a bit more gently:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

However you approach the matter, it seems safe to say that if you don’t know who you are, where you came from, where you’re going, and so on…then you don’t really, completely, fully know yourself.

To know yourself means to know – and to ask – The Big Questions.

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Knowing why you do what you do.

Why do we do what we do?

Good question.

“It’s because they’re stupid, that’s why. That’s why everybody does everything.”
- Homer Simpson

Homer aside, we often reach just a few inches away for the nearby, easy, short-term answers (“I did that because I wanted to!”) that don’t really tell us anything new. (“I think it so because I think it so!”)

Or when we try to go deeper, we often either reach for some elaborate, hyperintellectual, made-up theory or other based on flimsy evidence. (More rationalization than reason.)

Or maybe we just say we don’t really know. (At least that’s honest.) Stuff just seems like a good idea at the time.

Either way, it’s clear that lots of folks fool themselves about their own motivations. They think of themselves as compassionate, loving, unselfish, brilliant and so on. But if you’d follow them around with a camera all day, you might see that in fact, no small amount of their actual behavior is unkind, inconsiderate, selfish, dumb, silly, and so on.

And the opposite. Some folks might think of themselves as nothing special – or worse – yet they consistently act with kindness, compassion, courage, wisdom, and other good stuff.

There are also entire realms of stuff we do without knowing why. Compulsions, for example. And why do we dream? And why did I make that rude remark to my coworker? Why do people climb Everest? Why do people want to be famous, even though it seems pretty clear that fame is often a burden? And even our most mundane, obvious behaviors can be a mystery: after all, really, why, ultimate, do we work, marry, divorce, laugh, cry, dress fancy, have sex, have children, eat cupcakes and so on?

Of course, there are easy answers to all these, that are oversimplified. And there are deeper answers, that really dirty up the hands digging into the “why.”

To know yourself means knowing why you do what you do.

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Knowing yourself beyond psychological obstacles

What keeps us from knowing ourselves?

There are outer obstacles (distractions, misinformation, and thought police, to name just a few.)

And there are inner obstacles.

Sometimes, depression, anxiety, stress, addictions, various obsessions or compulsions, angst, lack of confidence, overconfidence, anger issues, fatigue, meaninglessness and so on are just part of life. They’re natural, unavoidable, and they aren’t “problems” –they’re things everyone who is actually living their life experiences. We experience them, and after a little while, they go away.

But sometimes certain conditions come and stay.

And sometimes these conditions “feel like us,” and sometimes they don’t.

To use a bit of jargon: psychologists call it “ego dystonic” or “ego syntonic.”

If depression feels like it’s part of you, it feels like you, it’s consistent with your self-image, then it’s “ego syntonic.” If depression feel like it’s not part of you – if it bothers you, troubles you, it doesn’t feel like you, if it feels like something different or foreign or alien that you want to fix or cure or get rid of – then it’s ego dystonic.

The point is: anxiety, depression, stress, angst and so on in themselves aren’t necessarily contrary to knowing yourself. Anyone who is living a full life – taking risks, experiencing ups and downs and so on – will experience these at some points.

But knowing who you are without certain kinds of anxiety, depression, stress, angst and so on – when you’re at full strength, maximum clarity, thinking your own thoughts at full power – well, that might be closer to real self-knowledge.

The basic point is simple: many folks who overcome these obstacles feel “more like themselves.”

Sometimes, to know yourself means overcoming these psychological obstacles.

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Knowing the ideas you have about yourself

Each of us has a vast storehouse of ideas about ourselves.

Some of these ideas we’re aware of. Others, we aren’t. Many of them are unconscious.

Some folks think of themselves as beautiful, brilliant, talented, fun, generous, good, loving, compassionate, understanding, intelligent, classy, attractive, friendly, and so on.

Some folks think of themselves in less glowing ways.

Some of these ideas might accurately reflect reality. Some might be totally false.

But here’s the thing: all of these are ideas.

And like any ideas, sometimes these are way off base. For example, there are beautiful folks who think they’re ugly, intelligent folks who think they’re dumb, wonderful folks who think they’re bad, folks who think they’re brilliant when actually they’re pretty dumb.

We all have ideas about ourselves. Some of these ideas are fairly accurate. Some aren’t.

To know yourself means knowing the ideas you have about yourself.

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Knowing yourself not only subjectively, but objectively

We usually see ourselves subjectively. “From the inside out.”

A total stranger who doesn’t know us and doesn’t need or want anything from us…they see us relatively objectively. “From the outside in,” like a scientist observing a specimen, or Spock observing a specimen.

We don’t have to get into a discussion about whether absolutely objectivity exists or not. Degrees of objectively work just fine here. A stranger will see us more objectively than we see ourselves. All we need to say.

Some folks only know themselves subjectively.

Yet we have a strange capacity not just to see from the inside out, but also to see ourselves, in a way, from the outside in. Sometimes we’re able to get a fresh view of ourselves, view ourselves in a different way, that’s more objective than it was before.

That’s a lot of what makes relationships so interesting.

Think American Idol, or any scenario where a singer performs onstage.

Someone up on a stage, lost and carried away by the sound of their own voice, is generally seeing themselves subjectively. After the judges critique them harshly (assuming they’re good judges) – and if the performer listens to and understands and even agrees with their critique – then that performer has a more objective view of themselves.

They know, see, experience themselves in a new way. They user intersubjectivity to redefine themselves in a way that might (or might not) be closer to reality.

Knowing yourself means knowing yourself not only subjectively, but objectively.

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Knowing your parts

A human being is a complex system.

We’re made up of lots of parts. Lots of interrelated, interconnected, multi-leveled parts. 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses – the brain’s memory capacity is around a quadrillion bytes. (source here) ) (We could keep going with crazy facts like this for quite a while. )

That’s just a small glimpse of what’s under the hood of this mysterious machine that we’re all driving around.

Part of knowing ourselves means understanding the elements, components, systems and sub-systems that make us up. You wouldn’t say you “know” cars unless you understand how they, overall – and their parts – really work.

So, what are these parts? Parts of ourselves?

To name just a few: your body, mind, thoughts, emotions. Your drives, instincts, hungers, desires. Your sexuality. Your relationships. Your imagination. All your deepest hopes and fears, memories, dreams, ideals and intuitions. And if you want to go all the way down, we could start talking about things like the soul, conscience, spirit, and more.

And by knowing these things, it’s not just a matter of knowing about them, or knowing that they exist, or being able to put names to them. It means really understanding how they function, what their larger purposes are, how they work together, how they all fit together into a larger, interconnected ecosystem.

To know yourself means knowing your parts.

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Knowing your “shadow”

Jungian psychologists work with a concept known as the “shadow.”

Essentially, the “shadow” consists of aspects of ourselves that – somewhere along the course of our lives – we rejected, cut ourselves off from, pushed away, forgotten about, repressed.

This was an inner event – something that happened within only ourselves – that might have been completely invisible to the average person seeing it from the outside.

For example: let’s say a young boy gets angry. His parents punish him harshly whenever he expresses anger. He learned to not express his anger, and eventually, to not even feel it at all.

In this instance, we could say that anger has been pushed into the unconscious. It’s become part of his “shadow.”

The solution to this is to make the unconscious, conscious.

To know yourself means to know your shadow.

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Knowing what you are

We hear a lot about knowing who you are. But we hear less about knowing what we are.

Are you a highly evolved animal? Or are you a being with some sort of spiritual nature? Or some combination of both, or neither?

Are you primarily a physical body? Or are you something else – something like a soul or spirit? Or both, or neither?

We can say we’re “human.” Does that mean you’re different from an animal, a plant, a rock, a planet? How?

We can say we’re “human,” but to know what that really means, beyond just putting a label to it…well, that’s a different matter.

To know yourself means knowing what you are.

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Knowing your destiny

It’s one of the Big Questions. But there’s also a practical, everyday experience of it.

And it makes intuitive sense: knowing yourself means knowing where you’re heading.

If you don’t know where you’re heading, then at least to some degree, by definition, you’re heading into the unknown. You might see a few steps in front of you, but on a bigger scale, you’re stumbling around in the dark.

When it happens on a small scale – if we’re walking with our eyes closed, or driving at night with the headlights off, or wandering through the woods without a clue of where we are – we put a stop to it immediately. We’d say it’s dangerous, it makes no sense, and it’s literally pointless.

But when it happens on a big scale – meaning, with our life itself – we brush it off like it’s no big deal. (“Bah! What’s on Netflix?”)

Of course, if you really want to go there – trigger warning/spoiler alert: ultimately, our physical “destiny” is taking the Dirt Nap. Dancing the Mortal Coil Shuffle. Coming to a sticky end. Going into the fertilizer business. Checking in to the pine box condo. The Final Destination.

And what lies beyond that? Nothing? Something? Heaven? Nirvana? Waking up from a dream, like Neo from The Matrix?

To know yourself means knowing where you’re headed.

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Knowing your “original nature”

“Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.”
- S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders

It’s another Big Question: to know where we came from. Our origin.

But there’s another meaning that’s closer to our everyday experience. Folks often reference this when they say things like “don’t forget who you are” and “don’t forget where you came from.”

One definition of Zen: “To see directly into one’s original Nature, this is Zen.” (From D. T. Suzuki.)

Taoism: “Realize thy Simple Self, Embrace thy Original Nature.” (Tao Te Ching, XIX)

Christianity: “…become like little children.” (Matthew 18:3)

What are we talking about here?

Our “original nature,” or becoming “like little children,” might refer to some aspect of ourselves that we seem to have repressed, cut ourselves off from, fallen away from, forgotten about, lost touch with.

Psychologist Michael Washburn describes ego growth in three stages: 1) the preegoic (before ego develops, when we’re very young); 2) egoic (normal human adulthood); and 3) transegoic (beyond normal human adulthood).

He describes a “Primal Repression” where we disconnect from what he describes as the “Dynamic Ground,” or what Suzuki or Taoism might call our “original nature.” (The “transegoic” phase he describes is a stage of reconnecting with what was lost in stage 1.)

Most of us can remember back to more innocent times, when we were children. And sometimes, when we think about how spontaneous, how energetic, how alive we were back then, at least in some ways, we long for it.

But long for what?

If it’s our nature – our original nature – well, that sounds like a big part of ourselves. A part of ourselves that we should get to know, if we can.

To know yourself means knowing your “original nature.”

Knowing your conscience

If you ask most folks whether they have a conscience or not, most folks will probably say something along the lines of, “why yes, I sure do!”

If you ask them what exactly they mean by that (“OK, so, what exactly is ‘conscience,’ anyway?) they’ll usually say something about knowing right from wrong.

But this seems to be something pretty profound that’s hiding in plain site.

The idea of there being some deeper part of us – something within us – that knows something extremely valuable that the rest of us apparently isn’t aware of – well, that’s a pretty profound idea. (And one definitely worth exploring more.)

But one thing we can definitely say about it now, if there is anything real to any of this at all…

To know yourself means knowing your “conscience.”

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Knowing yourself when you’re “fully awake”

As the story goes, a few years ago, a fellow named Siddhartha Gautama had himself what we’ll call an enlightenment experience.

After that experience, a movement formed around him that eventually turned into what today we’d call “Buddhism.”

When he was asked about that experience he had, his response was something along the lines of this:

“I am awake.”

Now presumably, the kind of experience that Gautama had was a pretty rare one. (After all, Gautama struggled mightily, full-time, for many years – fasting, meditating, studying under many teachers, mastering many techniques and practices, and much more before he had that final experience under the Bodhi Tree.)

We’ll say here, for the sake of argument, that most of the rest of us haven’t had an experience quite like that.

Which leads us to this: if his experience was becoming fully “awake,” and the rest of us haven’t had an experience quite like that…

…then it seems to be the case that the rest of us, to some degree or another, aren’t fully awake.

Meaning, a lot of us, at least to some degree, are sleepwalking through life.

It makes sense to us that if you’re sleepwalking – or sleepy at all – then you probably don’t fully know yourself. After all, to really be on your game, you have to at least be fully awake.

To know yourself means to be fully “awake.”

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Overcoming the “Core Delusion”

Einstein once said something pretty interesting.

He said that most of us are deluded. His words:

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘Universe,’
a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself,
his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest,
- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness.

The striving to free oneself from this delusion
is the one issue of true religion.

Not to nourish the delusion
but to try to overcome it
is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind."
- Albert Einstein

So, what the heck was Big Al talking about?

A “delusion”?

A delusion in our mind?

An “optical delusion” of our “consciousness”? Meaning, a flaw in our very mind, or awareness, or ability to perceive the world?

After all, suffering from an “optical delusion” of our normal vision would be one thing. We all have visual blind spots. No problem. But a delusion of our own “consciousness” – our very awareness of the world, and ourselves? Well, that seems pretty serious.

The basic idea seems to be that in our normal state – which means most of us, right now – we aren’t seeing the world, or ourselves, properly, in some kind of fundamental way.

This seems like a pretty radical statement. After all, much of humanity seems to carry on its business full of confidence, never doubting whether or not they basically see the world as it really is.

But is he right?

Well, from what we can tell, he’s onto something. It seems like Plato, Shakespeare, the Wachowskis, William Blake, Lao Tzu, Aesop, old Pakastani stories, and lots of other folks have said something roughly along the same lines. The idea is pretty universal.

And if anything close to this is actually the case, then well…we need to overcome it.

To know yourself means to overcome the “Core Delusion.”

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Mastering yourself

From the first moment we’re born, we’re struggling to master ourselves.

First we have to master some very basics: breathing. Eating. Lifting our head up by ourselves. None of this is anything we’re capable of at first; we have to struggle and achieve it.

We move on to potty training.

Hopefully, eventually, we “master ourselves” in that capacity. Some of us are still working on it.

We learn how to speak – mastering the tongue, in a sense. And we learn how to move, “mastering” our arms, legs, fingers toes, and so on.

The first few years of life, we struggle to master our bodies.

Soon after, we struggle to master our emotions.

To experience them, become aware of them, express them, name them, understand them, control them to a degree, prevent them from spilling and bursting out inappropriately in socially awkward situations, harnessing them without repressing them, overcoming them when they’re working against us, and eventually, hopefully, understanding and integrating them.

Eventually, if all goes well, we become adolescents. Then, there’s sex.

Then everything falls apart and we here we probably have to go back to struggling to master the emotions again.

Then, somewhere around this point, we work to become functional again, and then usually, we stop struggling. We basically stop growing.

Something like this gets said every so often: on the outside he’s 40, but on the inside, he’s 12.

On the inside, a lot of us are maybe 20, 25, 30. But beyond this, well, a lot of times, we stop developing.

But we could keep going.

Meaning, we could continue working to fully master our bodies, the way athletes do.

And then we could possibly keep going even further.

We could work to master our emotions.

We could work to master our minds.

And we could possibly keep going even beyond that. This gets us into the realm of “actualizing yourself” (that we dig into below.)

All this, of course, is no small feat. It’s the Mount Everest of the self, mastering the toughest challenges we know of. It’s difficult, it’s challenging, it may even seem impossible.

But lots of folks seem to see all this as pretty important.

“No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.”
― Pythagoras

“He who has conquered himself by the Self, he is the friend of himself; but he whose self is unconquered, his self acts as his own enemy like an external foe.”
- Bhagavad Gita, VI. 6

“Valor is the conquest of one’s own self.”
- Srimad Bhagavatam, XI, xii

“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”
- Proverbs XVI.32

“There is no greater victory in the life of a human being than victory over the mind….the true soldier is he who fights not the external but the internal foes.”
- Swami Ramdas

“…either thou killest iniquity or art killed by iniquity. But do not seek to kill iniquity as if it were something outside thyself. Look to thyself, mark what fighteth with thee in thee, and take heed lest thy iniquity, thine enemy, defeat thee…”
- St. Augustine

“He who conquers others is strong;
He who conquers himself is might.”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XXXIII

To know yourself means to master yourself.

 

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Becoming yourself

Let’s get back to where we started: Know Yourself.

But let’s stop for a minute and ask:

What does it mean to “know”?

It might seem like a silly question. But it gets interesting.

In the original sense, “knowing” didn’t mean simply memorizing some random, useless fact for a test. (“I didn’t know the definition of ‘mellifluous,’ I looked it up, now I ‘know’ it.”) That’s merely intellectual knowledge, mere information. And that’s not it.

Originally, the word “to know” didn’t mean mere intellectual knowledge, but something closer to this: “to become intimate with.”

Case in point: “Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived.”

To take it further: to become intimate with something is, in a sense, to become one with.

To know is to become.

We must become ourselves.

To know yourself means to become yourself.

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to oneself.”
- Erich Fromm

“You shall become who you are.”
- Nietzsche

To know yourself, you need to become yourself.

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Actualizing yourself

There’s an old saying that “…we know what we are, but know not what we may be.” (Shakespeare)

So…what may we be, exactly?

Instead of “actualizing” ourselves, let’s think of it more plainly: “realizing our potential.”

The words “human potential” get thrown around (and abused) quite a bit.

Usually they’re thrown around in the context of somebody nagging somebody else. (We’re either the naggers, or the ones being nagged.) Often it’s just in regards to homework. But when it’s about potential itself, typically, either somebody’s telling us we aren’t reaching it, or we’re telling someone else that they falling short of it.

But falling short of what, exactly? We rarely stop and really spell out what, with some precision, “it” is.

Of course, that might be an impossible task. After all, what is our potential? What are we capable of?

Well, there’s plenty of advice out there one how to squeeze and extra buck or two out of somebody, how to get twenty minutes worth of work done in ten, how to make yourself look/act/feel just a little better, and so on. All well and good.

Meaning, we often think about our potential as doing pretty much the same thing we’re doing now, but doing it bigger, better, faster, stronger.

That’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re going to throw out just a few options on the “human potential” front that don’t seem to really get much air time.

We’re talking about two capacities: of our hearts, and of our heads. (We explore more of this here.)

It might be the case that we’re Ferraris that typically get driven around in first gear.

Or we’re 50-story buildings where people only live in the basement.

Or caterpillars that don’t often change into butterflies.

Meaning, we might have some great, vast potentials: four more gears (if we’re a Ferrari), 49 more floors to hang out in (if we’re a building), the ability to sprout big, colorful wings and fly (if we’re butterflies. Or Iron Man. If it’s rocket boosters instead of wings).

What are we talking about, specifically?

Philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff call them our “higher intellectual center” and our “higher emotional center.”

Hinduism describes the Causal, Buddhic, and Atmic (Turiya) Bodies.

Buddhism describes the Alaya-Vijnana (Subtle Mind) and the Buddha Nature.

Islam describes the Ruh, Qalb, and Fitrah (primordial nature).

Chinese Traditions describe the Ling and Shen (T’ien/Speakable Tao and the Unspeakable Tao)

Judaism describes the various Sefiroth.

Christianity describes the soul and the spirit.

While these terms might be ignored, misused, or muddied up through misapplying them to all kinds of things where they don’t really apply…the basic idea is that we might have higher faculties than what we often think about in our day-to-day experience.

It could be like having the ability to read, but never being around books, and one day stumbling across an incredible novel. Or having a talent for music, but growing up with no music or instruments around, and one day hearing Beethoven or Beyonce. Or having a talent for dancing, but growing up surrounded by people who only walk, sit, and lie down, and that’s it…and suddenly, one day, meeting someone who busts out some moves. Full Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, James Brown.

Point being: discovering entirely new experiences we didn’t know we were capable of or even existed.

It might be like the experience of suddenly discovering that the Ferrari we’ve been driving has four more gears we haven’t even used yet. We’ve been driving this thing, this entire time, in first gear!

These higher faculties could be the mechanisms that moments of inspiration, elevation, illumination, “aha” experiences, peak experiences, work through.

These faculties could be part of our potential development for each of us.

Maybe a caterpillar hears some kind of crazy rumor about becoming a butterfly, but dismisses it as some kind of wild fantasy hogwash. Even if he were to take it seriously, he wouldn’t really know how to go about doing anything with it. It’s maybe just a lofty platitude (his mother caterpillar nagging him, that he’ll never reach his potential to become a butterfly) – instead of a hard reality. So he decides to spend our time on celebrity gossip instead.

Gurdjieff said something else: “The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.”

In this sense, we are all artists, and our greatest work of art is – or is supposed to be – ourselves.

You know yourself when you’ve become all that you are capable of becoming.

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Transcend yourself

Many folks are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s a relatively modern, at-a-glance answer to “why we do what we do.”

At the bottom of the pyramid: physiological (air, water, food, etc.) Moving on up the pyramid: safety, love/belonging/esteem, and at the top, “self-actualization.”

That’s the traditional and most well-known version of the hierarchy.

But as the story goes, the secret is now out that Maslow actually intended to add an additional category above self-actualization: self-transcendence.

What does it mean to “transcend ourselves”?

Nietzsche, long before Maslow, said “I am that which must always overcome itself.”

What was he talking about?

Well, since Fred isn’t around to interrogate, that’s tough to say we know exactly what he meant. But we can definitely say this, which should make sense to all of us: we can go beyond who we think we are.

The snake shedding its skin is a common metaphor in these realms. We outgrow old skins and have to leave them behind. It’s part of growth. If we aren’t shedding old skins, we aren’t growing.

Ideas – about the universe, things, others, ourselves – can sometimes become too constricting, old, outdated, restrictive. Sometimes we just outgrow them. It’s natural.

In a way, we do this often, and naturally. Infants grow into toddlers, and transcend infancy. Toddlers grow into kids, and transcend toddlerhood. Adolescence transcends the kid stages. Adulthood transcends adolescence.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

The process might well keep going beyond adulthood, into higher stages of growth (that isn’t merely degeneration in old age, but a higher stage beyond the typical adulthood).

At each new stage, if everything goes well, we develop new powers, responsibilities, pleasures, struggles; we’re aware of new things and unaware of others. We essentially move into different realms of being, and leave behind old ones.

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of letting go of the old stuff, the past, what we used to be, leaving it behind us…so we can become…whatever we are actually are, right now.

In the same way, it might be letting what’s new in us – whatever seed of some higher stage that we might have within us – grow, develop, blossom, become. And it might be the case that we don’t really know ourselves until we take that as far as we can go.

You know yourself when you transcend yourself.

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Lose yourself

Many folks fall in love.

Some fall so in love that they, in a way, lose themselves.

It might be falling in love with another person. It might be a group of people. It might be a set of ideas. It might be a process of discovery or exploration, like science. It might be an activity, like painting or singing or raising children. It might be an act of creation, like starting a business. It might involve something like contemplative spirituality.

Whatever or whoever it might be…when it happens, ”we” don’t matter anymore. What matters is whatever or whoever it is that we fall in love with.

Basically, we lose ourselves. We forget ourselves. We leave ours old selves behind.

Of course, this is a sword that can cut both ways.

Sometimes, for example, we can lose ourselves in whiskey.

Sometimes we can lose ourselves by devoting ourselves to some political or religious cause (for better or worse.) Sometimes we can lose ourselves even in something good – such as raising children – for the better…unless it becomes “for the worse” because it takes us over completely, at the cost of everything else. Sometimes we lose ourselves in dysfunctional relationships or codependency.

Sometimes, we become aware of something much larger than ourselves.

And paradoxically, sometimes, by losing ourselves in it, we find ourselves.

Again: this can happen for better or worse. A great deal – maybe everything – depends on what we “lose ourselves” to. But that said…

You know yourself when you lose yourself.

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Forgetting yourself

There’s a quote from a famous Zen Master named Dogen: “To practice Zen is to know the self. To know the self is to forget the self.”

There’s another quote from our good buddy, Big Al, aka Albert Einstein: “The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

C.S. Lewis said “…self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self…”

Viktor Frankl said “…the real aim of human existence cannot be found in what is called self-actualization. Human existence is essentially self-transcendence…”

August Turak said “it’s in our self-interest to forget our self-interest.”

…and so on. (We could keep going with quoting really smart folks, but instead, hopefully we can just agree that they were all on to something, and getting at roughly the same thing.)

Paradoxically, it just might be the case that to know yourself, you must move beyond yourself.

To know yourself means to move beyond yourself.

"The true value of a human being
is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which
he has attained liberation from the self."
- Albert Einstein

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Knowing whatever the heck these folks are talking about

Some folks have said some pretty interesting things about knowing yourself.

Some of it seems to involve what our potential – what we’re able to become – actually is. They seem to be a vision for what it means to actually realize our potential (instead of stopping at the dreamy platitude stage.)

Whatever it is they’re talking about…to fully know yourself means incorporating that.

“The Self is the goal of life; attain this goal.”
- The Upanishads

“Realize thy Simple Self,
Embrace thy Original Nature.”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XIX

“Those who realize the Self are forever free from the jaws of death.”
- The Upanishads

“Let me know myself, Lord, and I shall know you.”
- St. Augustine

“Whosoever knows himself knows his Lord.”
- Hadith of Rasul (SAW) (Islam)

“It would be easier to roll up the entire sky into a small cloth than it would be to obtain true happiness without knowing the self.”
- Shvetashvatara Upanishad

“The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
- Luke 17:21

“If the doors of perception are cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
- William Blake

“When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”
- Jesus, as quoted in The Gospel of Thomas
(Note: this isn’t official canon. But still – we’ve heard worse.)

“If you want to know me,
Look inside your heart.”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“When a man rightly sees his soul,
He sees no death, no sickness or distress.
When a man rightly sees,
He sees all, he wins all, completely.”
- Chāndogya Upanishad, 7.26.2

To know yourself means knowing whatever the heck these folks are talking about.

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OK. So now what?

Let me guess: you’re completely overwhelmed.

OK, maybe not. But when we look at the above…well, at least for some of us, it’s a bit overwhelming.

If much of the above is anything close to being on target, then at the very least, we’ve successfully demolished the idea that knowing yourself is easy. Old Thales and his drunken Tweets actually seemed to be on to something.

But that said…it also seemed to be worth doing.

Hopefully some of the above captured the sentiment that, well, “thyself” is a pretty good thing to know. At least as worthwhile as the starting roster of the Yankees or the latest celebrity gossip.

But what now?

Well, we can offer a few gentle suggestions.

1) It’s OK not to know who you are.

These days, many folks seem to be in a frantic rush to prematurely declare themselves as somebody, something, anything.

Maybe it’s everyone branding themselves, carving out niches on social media, trying to hit puberty and mid-life crisis as soon as possible…we don’t know.

But here’s one gentle suggestion: don’t know who you are for a while.

“I’m sick of not having the courage
to be an absolute nobody.”
- J. D. Salinger

This leads us directly to the need to…

2) Explore and experiment

Knowing who you are, at least to some degree, in some stages, comes from open, free, unpressured, experimental exploration.

(This isn’t to say that sometimes it also doesn’t come from putting yourself in high-pressure, white-knuckled, heart-pounding situations. But we’re starting with the basics here.)

It’s a basic point: you can’t know what food you like and don’t like without trying different kinds of of food.You can’t know what work you like without trying different kinds of work.

Ideally, our younger days can be full of experimentation and exploration. Hard-won, first-hand knowledge sticks. The rest we often forget.

“How can we learn to know ourselves?
Never by reflection, but by action.
Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are.
But what is your duty? The demands of each day.”
- Goethe

Which brings us to…

3) Avoid dead-ends, black holes, and self-suckers

You don’t get much hard-won, first-hand knowledge about yourself by chain-smoking Netflix series or video games.

This isn’t to say that you need to cut out Netflix or video games completely, either. We can learn stuff from just about anything with the right attitude. But we’re going to go out on a limb here and say this: there are limits to what you can learn about yourself through couch-surfing, and accepting all the endless distractions that life today offers.

The world, right now, is trying to swallow your time, money, energy and attention.

Don’t let it.

“Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. 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, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”
- Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

The world is trying to distract you, steer you, persuade you, manipulate you, right now.

Don’t let it. Steer yourself.

“To be nobody but yourself
in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else
- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight
and never stop fighting.”
- e. e. cummings

This leads us to…

4) Figure out who you are by figuring out who you aren’t.

Often, you can’t attack issues like this with a frontal assault, a straight charge right up the middle.

Obliquity works better. An indirect, organic approach.

Meaning, back away from everything that isn’t you.

And see what’s left.

“A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart.
We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves!
Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul.
Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart

5) All these definitions overlap and interconnect.

Let's imagine you're walking down the sidewalk one summer evening, and suddenly you see that a neighbor's house is on fire. And you hear a child inside.

What do you do?

Well, let's imagine that you "know what you should do" (#23 above) - we'll assume that this is to go save the child - and you have the courage to do it (#18) which means you've overcome fear of doing it (#19), which means at least to some degree, you've mastered yourself in that respect (39). You define your aim (21) and your personal mission (22) as at least in part helping other folks, and doing the right thing, you aren't fooling yourself about that (15, 16). Your conscience is telling you what to do (36) - but at any rate, you just totally forget yourself (43) and do what needs to be done.

You save the kid.

Obviously, the above is a messy, tangled overlap of all kinds of stuff going on. But hey, it resulted in your saving a kid from a burning building (in our imaginary scenario, at least.)

This is the kind of stuff that is all involved in "Know Thyself," the way we see it.

We can imagine that that are lots of ways that, if you don't know yourself, that scenario could have gone very differently.

The point is: in those few minutes, with that act, you both revealed yourself and, to a degree, defined/shaped/formed yourself.

This kind of stuff happens all the time, in many ways, large and small.

Drama reveals character. That's one reason why we're so fascinated by tv, movies, drama: it reveals who people really are.

And life is full of drama. Your life can reveal who you really are, almost as if it's really true that "all the world's a stage."

We don't always have lots of opportunities to be heroic in a big, flashy way. But we never know when the opportunity will come. We shouldn't wait until we're in deep water to learn how to swim. We need to learn it before we need it.

And we might not always like who or what gets revealed about ourselves when we have real-life drama.

All the more reason to "Know Thyself" now, while there's still time to do something about it.

6) Some things are more conducive to figuring yourself out than others.

Meditation, stillness, and solitude, for example, has a long and rich history of folks discovering themselves on much deeper levels.

“Experimenting” with, say, copious amounts of drugs and alcohol has a long and chock-full history of folks getting themselves more confused, out of sorts, incompetent, messed up in a thousand different ways, and imprisoned. (We aren’t teetotaling here. Just bringing up some well-established evidence.)

Steering towards general activities and people that tend to be more conducive to clarity, sanity, reality… and away from activities and people that tend to be more conducive to confusion, conflict and general mayhem…well, we can just say that this will probably improve the odds of knowing yourself.

And while we’re talking about improving odds…

7) Results are generally proportional to time and energy applied

Zen teacher Richard Rose used to say that “results are proportional to energy applied.“

It’s true in virtually any field – medicine, art, music, engineering, parenting, and so on. Of course, time isn’t the only factor. Walking in the wrong direction is still heading in the wrong direction.

But the idea is that this stuff is, at least to some degree, within our control.

You can choose to take actions that make a difference, improve your odds, foster insights, spark revelations.

If you come up with “I don’t know” to much of the stuff mentioned above…the way we see it, that’s perfectly OK. (You’re with folks like Socrates. Meaning, you’re in good company.) Life is a chance to discover those things.

But here’s a suggestion to consider:

Adopt an attitude that your purpose in life is to discover your purpose. Your mission in life is to discover your mission. Who are you? You’re someone who is figuring out who they are.

It’s an honest answer. Way better than a lot of others out there.

This doesn’t have to work as a permanent answer. Socrates admitted that he hadn’t solved the problem, but he never stopped trying – actively, purposefully, deliberately, relentlessly – to solve it.

That’s the best answer we have for now.

We're still looking for better ones. Your lovable, cuddly, ever-vigilant LiveReal Agents are always on the lookout. (Unless we're asleep, or passed out, or stuck elbows-deep in a diaper-change. But aside from that...ever-vigilant.)

Hopefully some of this has been useful.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that some of what we’re touched on above could easily be pursued through the entirely of a person’s life.

Or we can say it a different way:

To know yourself requires embarking on a kind of quest.

There are books to be read, thinkers to be explored, ideas to be considered, experiments to be run. If this kind of quest is taken on and not avoided, there will be hardship and confusion, struggle and pain, risk and even danger, and worse. As there is in any adventure worth its salt.

But the reward?

The reward is…well, yourself.

It’s worth taking.

Take it.

“For there is only one great adventure
and that is inward toward the self.”
- Henry Miller

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If you liked this, check out:

How to Rethink Your Entire Life: Foundations of a Life Philosophy

10 Existential Riddles Life Asks Each Of Us

Does Human Nature Have a Spiritual Component? (50 Pieces of Evidence)

What is "Human Potential"?

Experiential Spirituality: A User's Guide

The 7 Basic Worldviews: Tips for Surviving the Modern Worldview Crush

What Lies at the Bottom of the Unconscious?