Comment on how to know thyself

Time after time I come across books and articles in which authors (scientists, psychologists, writers) try to help people to understand themselves. They cite quotes from ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, modern scholars and explain them from their own perspective.
Psychoanalysts and psychologists are especially insistent on teaching self-understanding, having no clue of the dualistic nature of human being. They invented tons of “core characteristics” and made a terrible mess of them - the introverted vs extroverted, the rational vs the emotional, thinkers vs orators, the logical vs the emotional, analysts vs entertainers... Worst of all, this mishmash is taught in colleges and students bring it to the world and develop it.


How do we find out who we really are?
Unfortunately, humans almost haven’t progressed in this direction for last 2500 years and still could not understand themselves. Nobody knows thyself and his/her true “core characteristics” mostly because of ignorance of the basics.


The phrase “Know thyself” is one of the Delphic Maxims which were inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi town in ancient Greece around 2500 years ago. I can add here: if you understand who you really are you will understand how almost everything around really works because everything from the cell of your body to the Universe is organized according to the same principles, so indeed the “Know thyself - know God” expression is correct.


Actually, anyone can get to know and understand thyself, but first I suggest you familiarize yourself with the basics, which are entirely "unscientific", but nevertheless correct from my point of view:
1. Every human being like every living creature on Earth consists of the parts which are the soul and the body. Everyone is a quantum field engendered by the integration of the two. Our life, mind, behavior are just derivative quantum fields.

2. Our body became intelligent in the evolution and could survive by itself. Thus our bodies do something incredible from human’s point of view – they live their own lives (which means they follow their own program) and always limit physically all our abilities so we have to fit into these limits. Imagine the limitations imposed on you by your old or sick body – for example, when your vision deteriorates rapidly or you get paralyzed because of a ruptured vessel in the brain.

3. Sigmund Freud, a father of modern psychoanalysis was not right introducing the concept of conscious and unconscious mind. His Unconscious Mind is actually the Instinct – a consciousness of the body. Plants and animals have just that type of consciousness and use it all their lives. Humans have mind (mental consciousness) in addition and are blessed and cursed with that 2-in-1 faculty. Here is the root of human's Mind-Body problem.

4. We associate ourselves mostly with our mind and are very proud of it. It works constantly and pops up all the time like TV commercials or the government for taxes. Being smart is considered “good” and not smart is “bad”. We can follow the unfolding of the thought, so it seems we can "control" the thinking process.

5. Your life (as well as your death) is actually life/death of your body. You depend entirely on it. Your soul is relatively eternal and may return here in future incarnations, but your body never will. The purpose of the evolution of life on Earth is to create and improve the body, so we all are the aspects of our bodies despite the fact that we are sure of the opposite.

Thus the science has been studying only the mental part - less than a half of what a human being is as a whole. No wonder we still don’t know ourselves.


To know thyself, simply listen to your body and note its spontaneous reactions to the words or actions of others, to something what you read, see, hear, think, etc. A spontaneous reaction is your ultimate truth, a reaction of your body which is "smarter" than you.
And learn to distinguish the reaction of your body from the reaction of your mind. This is what good psychologists do while talking to you. They don't listen to your answers - the answers come from your mind and usually are misleading. When the truth needs to be found out, knowledgeable people observe your body's reaction to any question and can tell quite accurately when you are lying, even if you are sincerely lying to yourself.

For example, when in response to the question "where have you been yesterday?" a husband answers to his wife looking up and to his left - whatever he says is lie. Right (abstract) hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the past and the left (logical) hemisphere projects the present into the future. So a husband does not try to recollect the past, but is logically making up a plausible story.

The lie detector is based on the same principle.


See the difference in your mind's and body's perception of anything and go where your body leads you. You will learn a lot about yourself. You will be quite surprised at how "amoral" and different you are from the image your mind has painted for you. This is the beginning of the long trip which the ancient Greeks called "Know Thyself”.



P.S. Dear Reader! I am very much interested in your opinion on the subject of this article. Please, write a comment or ask a question if you want to clarify something.
Yours,
Igor Chykalov