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Knowing yourself is true wisdom

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.”–Lao Tzu.

Every day, a person’s mind goes through many contentions about yesterday and tomorrow. The series of thoughts come and go that bring either a desire to fulfil, which would give pleasure, or a desire to neglect, which provides pain. We manage ourselves in this physical world by acting on our dreams, acquiring material things, hoping for a bright future, and reflecting on our past to remember the worst that would have happened or the things that could have been avoided. 

We also strive to replace the pain of the past with future dreams. In every moment, we move on and off in the past and future like a pendulum. It never stays even for a moment in the present because we never see the present as bright, beautiful and charismatic as the future and not even as painful or dreadful as the past. There isn’t much value given to the present moment. It is as dead as your thoughts, which move to another one like lightning speed. No one wants to live in the present moment, which won’t give you a glimpse of a dream like the future does. It is merely a present you live by yourself. Now, when you say a moment with only you, not your dreams and memories, the question arises: what is only you living in that moment? It is indeed uncommon for you to seek a position to inquire yourself. 

In your lifetime, how often do you ask this question to yourself? Why would someone need to answer this? And why do you bother about getting into the breadth of this inquiry about yourself? Even though you are trying to avoid that question, in due course, it comes before you like a giant Goliath, ridiculing you, shaking all your beliefs, and throwing them into the pool of scepticism. It knocks your consciousness as your uninvited guest, stays within your mind, and constantly hammers your inner being, probing, who am I? That is the strangest feeling you felt on that occasion, and you seem to hate that very thought and strive to change it with a new one, which would be anything in the future or past. 

The following fundamental question will be: What was the rarest moment? For the shortest moment, a thought comes to your mind, a question that challenges your existence. And for how long does that question try to hold you in the confines of uncertainty? It mainly arises when you fear the future and hope for a past to cherish. This means now you are looking at dreams as dark clouds and registering a past as bright as the sun. At that moment, you lose all hope of desires and realise you cannot taste an inch of your past; you try to concentrate on the present moment, which is nothing but throwing a ball in your court of mind to hit it with the full potential of your consciousness being wakeful to know yourself. How long it stays depends on how strong the fluctuations in your mind have not affected your consciousness. If the inquiry has moved by the gust of wind, you lost that opportunity to contend.

If we go back and talk about when you were born, someone gives you a name, a culture, and beliefs, but that is only the point at which you identify or introduce yourself to others. When you try to introduce yourself to yourself, search for the identity that you will only be getting through self-awareness. A person is born with the human body, mind, and life force that drives his physical body, but that is not him. It’s only an identifiable entity of his to the world, but not his real identity. Understanding oneself as a physical creature made up of material existence and going after possessing power, money, and happiness throughout one’s life is material, but the actual self is non-material. Knowing yourself means realising a true you with the help of your physical birth.

Again, if you stay in the present moment, which is a significant step towards total submission — a glimpse of aboveness which inquires, what are the basics of existence in this world? What are actual abilities or limits as a person? The question has never been unanswered if you read the holy scriptures. But finding answers about yourself requires constant scrutiny of your existence and acknowledging it at crucial times when a person is so confused about his identity, beliefs, and overall individuality. Knowing yourself is significant. All man’s actions, thinking, feeling, and gaining all forms of secondary knowledge to understand the world never satisfy his presence in this world, but self-knowledge and realising it at the very occasion, which is your present moment.

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