Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Aristotle

Ever find yourself barreling through life on autopilot?  That was me for certain a few years ago!  Too often we follow set patterns in our life, ignoring our true feelings and self.  To some extent, we are forced into this mode, especially if we have a family that we have to provide or care for.  But when we operate on autopilot, much of what we do is dictated by others and may be contrary to our own desires and needs.  We try to conform to the expectations imposed by society, family, school, friends, and our culture in general.  Much of the time we don’t even realize this.  We are zombies - animated creatures with no discernable life purpose and seemingly mindless.  At the end of the day we wind up feeling drained and empty inside and we are not certain why we feel this way or how to break out of this pattern of lethargy. 

Much of the problem stems from the fact that we frequently operate from habit, and never consider what options might be available to us.  Worse yet, if we do begin to look at alternatives in our daily lives, we are confronted with endless choices and so decision making becomes a stumbling block in and of itself.  It can become such a large obstacle that it pushes us back to the easy, mindless path – the one with least resistance!

So, why is it such a difficult thing to break these habitual patterns and begin to make life choices that fulfill our needs?  I’m certain we can identify plenty of answers to that question, but I think that the predominant reason is simply that we don’t know what we want!  How can we ever hope to select the best choice among the options confronting us if we have no idea how we feel about them?  As improbable as it seems, many of us advance well into our adult lives with only the faintest glimmer of who we are and what we want from life.  So how do we reach a point where our lives begin to “flow” and choices come naturally?

Take a quick look at the opening quote again.  This simply stated truth from Aristotle contains two key words, knowledge and wisdom, that are worth further thought.  Understanding the difference between these words is critical to our journey of self-discovery.

Let’s begin by defining knowledge as facts, information, and skills acquired through education or experience.  We spend our lives in the pursuit of knowledge, whether we realize it or not, from the day we are born until the day we die.  You are actually acquiring knowledge right now as you read this post (unless, of course, you fell asleep two paragraphs ago).

Wisdom, on the other hand, is the ability to think and act using our knowledge.  So wisdom then may be thought of as the application of knowledge in our daily lives.  For example, consider the difference between a ten year old person and a ninety year old person.  Which would you guess was the wiser of the two?  It’s certain that the ninety year old has a richer storehouse of knowledge than the ten year old.   However, the real key is that the ninety year old has also had much more experience applying that knowledge to their life experiences.  So wisdom then requires both the knowledge and application of the knowledge!  Note that simply having knowledge does not make one wise.  Conversely, one cannot be wise if they have no knowledge.

And so the concept of “knowing yourself,” as the quote states, becomes the process of acquiring knowledge about who you are.  The more of this knowledge that you have, the better equipped you are to respond to life situations – in other words the more potential wisdom you will have.  Notice that I said “potential” regarding your wisdom.  While having knowledge enables us to act wisely, it does not guarantee that we will do so!

If you will kindly look the other way for a moment, I would like to sneak another term into our discussion – authenticity.  This is one of the key elements in codex vita’s tagline and so it’s only appropriate that we begin considering it right from the start.  The term authentic refers to the property of being genuine, real, not false, trustworthy, and reliable.  Wow, that’s an intense set of properties!  It also happens to be one of the goals that we are striving for in our daily lives if we follow the codex vita path.  We’ll delve into authenticity in greater detail in another post, but I wanted you to have a sense of how we are applying it to ourselves since our authenticity flows from our awareness and understanding of ourselves.

Sounds easy enough, right?  All we have to do is acquire knowledge of who we are.  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that.  When I talk to people about self-discovery, I usually see them cringe or flash a frown.  There is a reason for that.  Self-discovery is an elusive creature and it may just be one of the more difficult things you will ever do in your life.  However, it is well worth the effort since as you begin to understand yourself and begin living according to that understanding, you will find magical things begin to happen.  The focus you place on being your authentic self will permeate throughout all of your daily activities, especially in interactions with others.  And trust me – the people around you will notice – in a very positive way!

So how do we gain access to this knowledge?  What does it look like?  Where is it stored?   Unfortunately, it’s not like looking something up in an encyclopedia.  You won’t find a table of contents or an index in which you can learn about a particular characteristic.  In fact, as we shall learn, we can only see the knowledge of who we are through indirect observation!

Consider our conscious and subconscious minds for a moment.  We know that our brain collects sensory data and stores patterns of information linked to that data that may be accessed through thought.  The brain is a complex organ that is part of our physical body.  The mind, unlike the brain, is not a physical organ that we can see or touch.  Instead, the mind represents our thought processes.  It is through the mind that we understand the world we interact with and the feelings associated with that interaction.

We know that our conscious mind represents our awareness of ourselves within our environment.  Its focus is on the single point that we are aware of on in any given moment.  Its focus constantly changes as we scan our environment.  The conscious mind has no memory and continuously makes associations between ourselves and what it perceives in our environment.  In contrast, the subconscious mind has a vast library of knowledge.  This knowledge comes from our experiences and includes the influence of our parents, teachers, friends, religious leaders and so on.  Much of the information in our sub-conscious is placed there through repetitive patterning and includes our beliefs and experiences – in other words our personality.

So why is it so difficult to get to know and understand ourselves?  And by this, I mean achieving an internal understanding of who you are.  Well, as I mentioned earlier, our subconscious mind is not normally directly accessible.  We have to find a way to indirectly access the characteristics and beliefs that make up our personality.  We know that when we are faced with life situations, our mind provides guidance and feedback in the form of feelings or emotions.  It is by associating those emotions with different situations that we can begin to identify our true personality.  One important idea to keep uppermost in your mind is that we often employ filters in our day to day lives.  In order to conform to social conventions or not hurt the feelings of others, we often suppress our true feelings and express what we believe the world wants to hear.  As we progress to the exercises, we must disable our filters!  It becomes YOU understanding who YOU are with no need or care to justify yourself to anyone!

Another pitfall is that as we explore our personality, we sometimes encounter roadblocks to true knowledge.  Ego often gets in the way because our ego filters our thoughts to present them in such a way that we seem more appealing to others.  Another barrier may be fear based.  We often act out of fear.  This may be a fear of events in our past as well as fear of future events.  Because of these fears, we shape our beliefs to avoid fear as much as possible, but by doing so we are no longer thinking or acting authentically.  Emotion may also play a role in masking various aspects of true self-knowledge.

Now that we've set the stage, it’s time to begin exploring.  In part 2, we will look at some of the more conventional methods of self-discovery.  And part 3 simply throws the book of conventional methods out the window and allows us to explore in a way we may have never thought possible!

Stay tuned – part 2 coming right up……………….

Namaste