Are we really aware of who we are? Are we aware of the drives and motivations that lead our behavior? Learning about the human brain and psychological structure allows us to know more about our capacities and functionality. We learn more about ourselves. We are all human animals, and all share a common body and brain physiology that produces or creates consciousness within that body. We have much in common when it comes to knowledge about ourselves.
To understand ourselves more is to gain self-knowledge. This is also known in past times as the quest to know-thyself. Self-knowledge is part of philosophy which is philo-sophia, the "love of wisdom". Wisdom is not simply knowledge input or understanding processed. The greater wisdom is from acting and living in alignment with principles of moral truth. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the love of right-action. No one would say doing wrong-actions or acting foolishly would be to act wisely.
Many people can be said to live by a philosophy. Maybe for some it's more of an ideology with the implication of being stuck in a box of thinking where false things have been accepted as true. Ideology is just having your drives and motivations being led by one or more ideas, which we all are in some way more or less. There's nothing inherently bad there. We are going towards the future in life with change and potential improvement in mind, hopefully. We can change ourselves and the world. We need to envision better things in consciousness in order to try to create them into existence. The idea of a greater moral truth to actualize and realize into existence is something to strive for. The thinking and attempts to derive a way of living -- how to act and behave -- can be more or less morally true or false by comparison.
Philosophy -- love of wisdom, love of right-action not wrong-action folly -- is not just about learning and trying to understand things more, but the goal is towards understanding right from wrong, true from false, moral from immoral. Learning a moral truth and taking it into our own will, will guide our actions and determine our conduct in life to act more rightly.
There are many ways of living. The way we live has multiple aspects to it that we might not know are violating the way we say we want to be living. We are often blinded by our conditioning into the current condition we live in, just accepting and not really thinking about it. But we can enhance or develop more moral understanding if we look see what's going on. To realize the real lies with real eyes. Then the threads that make up our way of living can be separated to clean up the bad philosophies or ideologies we have accepted.
When our philosophies are flawed we can create foolishness and suffering for ourselves or others, even we don't know. Think of how our taxes go to fund wars. We foolishly engage in tax funding so that the war machine and the military-industrial-complex can keep pumping, and this not only creates suffering for others in foreign lands that we ignore the plight of, but we also suffer in debt and more printing of money that inflates the money, and on and on where eventually the ones who suffer from all these money manipulations are the regular people. We keep this going and it makes us all foolish, and we and others suffer for it.
The "love" of wisdom to behave and conduct our lives in a way that is conducive to producing rightness, or simpler to say reducing wrongness. We don't need to heal if there isn't something wrong. It's more about healing the wrongs than trying to think of right things to do. Anything not wrong is right by default. We can heal ourselves and the world from its current condition by stopping to do all the wrong things, things many of us aren't even aware we are doing. In a way we are unconsciously living, unaware of what our actions are even doing. Taxes are one example of the harm and suffering we create for others by acting foolishly in our out-sourcing and abdicating our authority to a hierarchical ladder of representatives while we just want to enjoy life and not think about things more deeply.
If you're following so far, philosophy is ultimately about optimizing our way of living to be wise and act-right, not foolish and act-wrong. The greatest affect on our behavior comes from having or lacking understanding of a moral truth. If we don't pay attention to what our actions are really doing to others in the long interconnected chain of how things happen on this planet, then we will remain ignorant of what's really happening behind the scenes of our personal lives. There are often consequences to our actions, even if we aren't the ones feeling it. We can grow our awareness to include what our actions are doing to others, both in nearby and long-distance places, and in the short and long-term.
What we do is part of who we are, an important part. What we do -- our actions and behavior -- is an external culmination of internal aspects of consciousness: our thinking and feeling. Our behavior is who we are because it's a reflection of who we are internally that creates those actions and behaviors. This is why self-knowledge -- to know-thyself -- is important, because we have internal drives and motivations that lead us to create our actions. Our actions define us and our character. Actions are the etched onto us like characters for others to recognize.
We have various ideas, beliefs, truths and falsities accepted, as well as many unconscious and subconscious factors that influence what we do. If we don't know what is driving us, then are we really leading and living our own lives consciously, willfully? Or do we only think we are -- while we're more on autopilot -- because we haven't gained enough self-knowledge to understand the human brain and consciousness functionality -- nor our own individual psychological framework -- that influences us to live a certain way?
Let me know what you think ;)