Self-knowledge
We never have time to know ourselves
We know our names, where we live and what we do for a living. But do we know who we are?
If someone asks you whether you know yourself, you will most likely say yes. You know your name, where you live, where you work; you even know your ID number by heart. “Of course I know who I am,” we say. And yet what we know is barely the outer part of our personality.
We never have time to learn about our inner world. We do not give enough importance to this. However, it is necessary to do this work consciously.
And it is not just a lack of time. We live much longer in our inner world than in the outer one—among thoughts, desires, emotions, inner talk and imaginings—and even so, we do not know it.
Knowing oneself is not a matter of accumulating data about oneself. The first conference of the course defines it this way:
To know oneself is to achieve identity with one’s own Divine Being, to know oneself identical with one’s own Spirit, to directly experience the identification between the object of knowledge and the subject who knows. That is what we can and must define as Self-Knowledge.
That is why the fundamental thing is to truly come to know ourselves: to know where we come from, where we are going and what the purpose of existence is.
Where to begin? With self-observation: seeing ourselves as we are, in every aspect of life, voluntarily and consciously. When someone begins to observe themselves with the intention of seeing themselves, it is a sign that they want to discover themselves and change from the inside out.
That is the beginning of the path: to stop looking outward and to turn our gaze toward the inner universe called oneself.
This article is based on Conference 01 of Phase A: UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE QS AND OBJECTIVES.
