Know Thyself

I always make an effort to know people for who they really are. I want to know what are they like under the surface, what do they live for, how do they feel, why do they do what they do.

I ask them questions to get an idea of how well do they know themselves. I observe them so I can understand them better, and I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I’ve gotten good at reading people. By reading I don’t mean I judge what they do, I simply put their actions and words together to make an equation. And I try solving it.

Now, I’m at a point in life where my own being is a mystery to me. I do,say and believe a lot of things I don’t quite understand myself. I have strange questions brewing in my mind. Do i really know who I am? Why do I do what I do and why do I not do what I don’t do? Can I explain my being without having another person describe it for me?

There are so many people in your life but not one knows all about you. Not the mother who gave birth to you, not the person you tell all your secrets to, not even the one who knows you in the most intimate of ways . They might know the little stuff, like your habits,hobbies. what you like most, what you hate most, but they cant claim to know you completely. The only person who can know you is the one you’ve spent the most time with, who has been through everything with you, that good and the bad, and that is you, yourself.

The knowledge of the self isn’t already there. Years of conditioning is usually what makes us who we are. We create an image of the self based on this conditioning. Conditioning includes cultural, religious, social and all other kinds of factors. Our experiences add up to make our beliefs about the world and ourself.

I remember, once, a very wise teacher of mine who I still look up-to, told us how important it is to know oneself. For knowing oneself is knowing God. At the time his words felt vague. He then shared his own story about how when he was a child, his teacher asked him to write down all he knew about himself. He pondered upon it for over a week and at the end handed about 16 pages with all the possible pictures he could paint of himself in words. His teacher read those and told him that he was disappointed to know that his best student was worth only 16 pages. And since then, the student has never stopped exploring himself. He has grown up to be one of the most genuine people I know.

Now this little story doesn’t imply that everybody should start doing a thesis on himself, it only means that one should know himself better so he can live a life in awareness and consciousness. We have to understand that we aren’t only what we identify our self with i.e our name, family backgrounds, nationalities, religious beliefs, institutions and professions. These are all labels, we ought to know who we are beyond these labels.

And that is what I want to do for myself. Know it, question it, understand it and come up with the answers I’m looking for.

Whatever will follow would be an attempt to understand , analyze and answer.