Knowing oneself

THIS may sound like a useless matter. And that is precisely where our problem starts. We fail to know who we really are in our most radical self, and so we think, speak and act in ways that do not correspond to our true and ultimate identity.

            Yes, it’s true we know a lot about ourselves. The years that have gone by, with all the experiences, insights and the growing body of knowledge we accumulate cannot but yield a rich and deep awareness of who we are.

            But that frame of mind can also be a problem to us. Precisely because we are confident we already know who we are, we fall into the trap of not pursuing the task of knowing ourselves further.

            It’s a case of the good being the enemy of the best. My self-knowledge is good enough, we say in so many words, so why go any further? We get contented with what we may call as our most natural way of knowing ourselves, without bothering that there are still more dimensions and layers underlying our real identity.

            We get contented with our identity in the physical sense, or genetic, family and social sense. We know ourselves quite well as to how we are emotionally and psychologically. Our legal status and political leanings, we know them as well.

            But would that body of self-knowledge be enough? Would there be nothing else that would give all these info and data about ourselves their consistency, their source, their criteria, their direction, meaning and end?

            It’s the sensitivity to these questions that should lead us to ask ourselves, at least, that there must be some basis and foundation of all these pieces of info and data of our self-knowledge. This is where we can be pointed to our creator.

            And this creator simply cannot be our parents, nor our grandparents and ancestors. Neither can we just conclude that we come to be by some spontaneous self-generation.

            So this creator cannot be other than a very special being whom we cannot help but refer to as the Supreme Being, or God. He is the author of everything. He knows everything and everyone in the best and complete way.

            No one knows us better than God. Ergo, if we want to know ourselves well, we have to know, love and serve God first. That’s in theory. In practice, we get to know God through the things of this world.

            So let’s see to it that our dealings with the things of this world would lead us to God. And once we gain some knowledge of God, let that knowledge shed light on everything else, including ourselves in a dynamic and cyclical process of mutually knowing God and knowing ourselves and everything else.

            We need to sharpen our awareness of this process, since this is often taken for granted. We either are too worldly as to be blind about the reality of God, the world of the spiritual and the supernatural. Or too other-worldly, too spiritual, that we neglect the things of the world, thereby missing an indispensable way to know God.

            What is crucial to know is that once we have an inkling about the existence of God and that as creator he actually initiates everything from creation to his abiding providence, then we should be most eager to know more about him through the explicit revelation he has made especially through his Son who became man, Jesus Christ.

            A good and growing knowledge of the life and teachings of Christ would put us in the right track as to how to see ourselves and the world in general, in such a way that such knowledge of ourselves and the world would also lead us back to God in that dynamic spiral of mutual knowledge between God and us.

            This is the ideal that we should aim at achieving. And in this we have to help one another, giving the appropriate testimony and example, in words and especially in deeds, to the others.

            The world now is practically sunk in a very secular culture that is blind to the reality of God and of the world of faith. We cannot be indifferent to this predicament. We need to show one and all that everything in us and in the world is nothing, is meaningless, is dangerous if God is not made its beginning and end.

            We would miss the truth about ourselves and the world, be it politics, business, education, etc., if God is not made the be-all and end-all.