“Know Thyself” Part 1 – Three levels

One of the three[1] famous sayings of the Oracle, inscribed on the ruins at Delphi was 

Know Thyself

The message proclaimed that before you embarked on anything meaningful in life, the first step was ‘know yourself’. It was emblazoned across the temple so that no one would forget and no one could ignore the timeless wisdom of it.
 
And it is timeless.
 
Leaders in their leading, parents in their parenting, teachers in their teaching, politicians in their governing, friends in their friendship – the list could include every meaningful thing we ever do. Unless we know ourselves, every word we speak, every decision we make, every perspective we form, every relationship we try to form, every situation we seek to influence, will be formed around a distortion of reality. If we cannot see our role in a conflict then we won’t resolve the conflict. If we can’t lead ourselves, we won’t lead anything and to lead ourselves is to know ourselves well. 
 
But what does it mean to know myself well?
 
I think the invitation is at three levels.
 
The facts on the ground
The most basic level of knowing myself are the facts that everyone knows, or could know about me. I’m 6’ 2” tall and that self-knowledge makes me wary when I go into old buildings with low door ways. Age, where I live, what schools I went to, my parents’ names, what my stomach can tolerate in food choices, how far I can cycle without my knees hurting, and a gazillion other pieces of knowledge all help to shape my navigation through life at its most basic level. 
 

Waking up
The next level of knowing myself is what is usually called consciousness, but more informally called ‘waking up’. How awake am I to myself? Am I curious about why I do what I do? Why I’m thinking what I’m thinking? Why I’m feeling what I’m feeling, in both my body and my emotions. For years I didn’t pay attention to my body and what it was trying to tell me. Only a few years ago I realised that I hadn’t been conscious about how badly I breathed. Did that matter? Hugely. Breath is the very source of all our physical, emotional and mental health. For too many years I didn’t know myself. Then I woke up!
 
As well as being awake to my body, was I awake to my feelings? When asked ‘What do you feel about that?’, people will often tell you what they think. Yet feelings are invariably a more accurate barometer of what is actually going on inside of us. The thing about some feelings that feel too difficult for us to face is that we keep them hidden, keep them out of conscious view where we hope they will not go noticed, but where in fact they create a great source of our unconscious behaviours. And then there is awareness of our thoughts, 90% of which are repetitious and totally unproductive for our lives. We only need to stop rushing around and start meditating regularly to notice a whole drama of thought life going on inside of ourselves. Does that matter? Hugely. Our thoughts are affecting our emotions and our behaviours moment by moment.
 
I am a great believer in therapy for everyone at some stage of their life, not just those who are struggling, because it is often the first route that we can take in seeking to understand our deeper motives, as well as all the ways in which we collude and play games with ourselves and others. It’s an obvious pathway to waking up. For example, we think we are being kind, but others are experiencing us as distant or cool, or we think we are being generous when in fact we just want to be liked. If we don’t know ourselves, we will think we are being one way in the world and yet others are experiencing us very differently and we won’t know why people are reacting to us the way that they are. Waking up to our motives and deeper streams of what is going on within us is vital if we are to have deeper, more intimate and more lasting relationships. Waking up to our impact on others is vital in developing more influential relationships. Not all of this self-knowledge needs to be within the public-domain, because its personal and private, but it does need to exist with our own personal consciousness-domain. What is important is that I have the self-knowledge and use it well in my relationships and in my decision making and self-leadership. In the words of Ken Wilber[2], waking up is the key to growing up, cleaning up the consequences of a lot of our unconscious behaviours and their effect on others and showing up with all of ourselves, the comfortable and uncomfortable dimensions of ourselves, to benefit the world in some way. 
 
Excavating the roots
The deepest level of ‘knowing thyself’ is knowing something of the core of who we are. If the first level is factual and the second level of self-knowledge is more psychological and psycho-somatic (body-mind), then the deeper level might be called soul or spirit. The ancients Greeks said you were born with a Daemon, the Romans called it your Genie. Others call it your Buddha nature or Christ consciousness. It was the deepest part of you that knows you better than anyone and loves you more deeply than we can often fathom. It knows who you are and why you are here on earth. What are your gifts and talents and what are your deepest wounds? (Gifts and wounds live inseparably side by side) Why are you here? What is your unique contribution to life?  What is the mission that you came into the world for?
 
Many people look at these questions and say ‘I don’t know’. I don’t know what my purpose in life is, what my gifts are, what my potential contribution is. Such a response is entirely normal because the answer is there….but buried. It needs excavating. A mission in life isn’t just sitting on a plate for all to see…it is there but it has to be detected. Literally like a detective of our own life, we need to follow the clues, or the breadcrumbs, to uncover our own core life force and life story. As Jostein Gaarder said in a different context, ‘the world doesn’t surrender her secrets easily[3]’. Like a shy lover, our deepest selves will only come out in response to kindness and curiosity from ourselves towards ourselves. Being frustrated and angry with ourselves just doesn’t work. It is a life time exploration, but with each new part of yourself uncovered, a new life energy will find its way to doing something useful to remake the world a little better. But if we stop exploring, we will stop revealing the ‘more’ of ourselves,  to the benefit of ourselves and the world.
 
The wisest of thinkers over the millennia speak of the divinity that lies within every human being. The pearl. Meriam-Webster[4] says an oracle is a shrine in which a deity reveals hidden knowledge, or the divine purpose, through such a person. 

Know Thyself was named as one of the oracles of Delphi because it is the vital route to revealing that divinity, that pearl, that 'you', within every one of us as much today as it was a few thousand years ago

[1] The other two were, "nothing too much" and "give a pledge and trouble is at hand".

[2] Ken Wilber     (2017)  The Religion Of Tomorrow       Shambhala     Colorado

[3] Jostein Gaarder (2001)  Maya   Phoenix  London

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oracle