Today I want to reflect on the meaning of the famous maxim "know thyself", which was inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Knowing yourself means knowing who you are, knowing what you are. Self-knowledge is achieved through self-observation and introspection; observing your thoughts, knowing their origins; observing your feelings, knowing their reasons; observing your actions, knowing their causes. All of this leads us to self-knowledge. Someone who knows himself understands himself. Understand why he does what he does, feels what he feels, and thinks what he thinks, understands who he is, and understands the meaning of each of these things.
If you look inside yourself you will see that there are things that please you and things that displease you, things that you like and attract you, and things that you dislike and repel you, things that give us joy and happiness, others that scare us, etc. Many times we tend to think that we have no decision about these things, that our free will is limited by these things, that we don't decide what things we like or dislike, or what things make us happy or scare us. But that's wrong. We do decide, there is a reason why we feel or think each of those things, only that we make that decision unconsciously, that is, without having knowledge of it, without knowing why we do it, but those decisions are carried out, and they are done by a part of us that we are not aware of.
If you look carefully why you want the things that attract you, you will understand that there is a reason why you are looking for those things, and you will know it, and you will understand not only why you, in fact, are deciding to be attracted to that thing, but also, you will understand your behavior towards those things. Because it is evident that we move towards the things that attract us and we move away from the things that repel us, it is our natural behavior, and most of our day-to-day actions tend to seek to get closer to the things that attract us, that we desire, and distance ourselves from the things that repel us, but we do this instinctively, automatically, without realizing why we do it. Without understanding ourselves. Without being aware.
This happens precisely because we don't know ourselves, and therefore don't have full control over us. This causes that many times we do things that we don't want to do, or that we don't do things that we want to do, even that we don't know what to do, thus losing power over what we do. We simply don't understand much of what we do, think, and feel because we don't really know ourselves.
The process of knowing yourself is simply the process of knowing all those things that happen in our psyche beyond consciousness, it is about knowing those things that we already know but don't know that we know. To make that we can observe not only what is in our perception, not only what happens in our mind or in our body, but that we can observe what is beyond our perception, the origin of what our body and our mind do. That we can observe the observer, and we can contemplate without hesitation the essence of what we are, the ultimate cause of everything we do. In order to know who we are and what we are, in what state we are, where we come from and where are we going.
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