Self-Knowledge

"Know thyself" - Oracle of Delphi (469 B.C.)  
"You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" - John 8:32  

After discovering who I am, the place I occupy and the time in which I live, through the practice of self-awareness, the search for the meaning of my life requires me to question my identity, to know myself, to understand who I am, what I am, and how I am.

To live life meaningfully, I need to know my talents, natural inclinations, and tendencies, my flaws, my way of being and acting, so that I know what I can count on before deciding what to do with my life.

A Continuous Process
Human beings are not physical objects that can be delimited, measured, and weighed, nor can they be placed in a test tube; they are not static and thus are not the same over time; they grow, change, and transform. There are as many general rules as there are exceptions, so a final definition is not possible, because human beings always escape any kind of conceptualization.

Although it is not possible to define the human being completely and once and for all, we can nonetheless find constants, feelings, emotions, ways of acting and thinking that repeat themselves, revealing a certain type of character and personality that can guide us in living the present moment with meaning. These are inconclusive conclusions that serve to formulate other questions and to gradually give direction and purpose to our lives.

The Johari Window
This technique helps us to understand clearly the relationship we establish with others and with ourselves. Like the traditional windows in our homes, it is divided into four small panes and two intersecting areas. The first area concerns what others know and do not know about me; the second concerns what I know and do not know about myself. From the intersection of these four areas, various types of "self" emerge: the open self, the blind self, the hidden self, and the unknown self.

The Open Self: This is made up of the attitudes, values, and behaviors that I know and others also know about me. This is the public self, an area that contains information that is known to everyone: name, age, facts, talents, etc.

The Blind Self: This is made up of things I do not know about myself, but others do. This is proof that human beings are social beings. Our individuality is formed in continuous confrontation with others, starting with those who are most significant to us, like our parents and siblings.

We are incapable of seeing our face as it truly is. The image we see in the mirror is always a distortion of reality since there are no perfect mirrors. Others see my face as it really is; thus, one of the keys to my intimacy, to my self-knowledge, lies with others. One who is inside the forest sees only trees and not the entire forest; the other brings me objectivity and a global view of who I am…

 "Who do people say that I am? (…) But who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:27, 29). Others may have a very different idea and image of me, and theirs is just as true as mine. I am, at the same time, what I think I am and what others think I am.

It is important to maintain a friendly relationship with a person who is significant to us, so that he or she can always give us feedback on who we are and how we are perceived by others. Even Jesus himself needed this feedback from His disciples.

The Hidden Self: This is made up of what we know about ourselves that we choose not to reveal to others, out of fear or for other reasons; it is what we call our privacy and intimacy, feelings, and past experiences we prefer not to disclose. In general, if this area is too large, we may be judged as lacking authenticity.

It is psychologically healthy to have someone who knows everything or almost everything about me; it is essential to have a friend with whom I am an open book, with whom my self is fully open. But, for safety’s sake, there cannot be too many of these people.

It is not without reason that people say, "May God protect me from my friends, for I can defend myself from my enemies," or, "Do not reveal your heart, even in pain, for he who bares his heart betrays himself”.

The Unknown Self: This is made up of all the material in our unconscious that sometimes surfaces without warning when something unexpected happens; it is information about ourselves that is still undiscovered and unknown to us or to others; areas of recognized talent, potential, motives, or childhood memories that lie dormant, influencing our behavior in ways unknown to us.

The unknown self is subject to a maxim of psychology that could well have been inscribed in the modern-day Oracle of Delphi: what we know about ourselves we can control; what we do not know controls us. It is in this sense that Jesus advises us to know the truth, for only by knowing the truth about ourselves can we be free, can we have our lives in our own hands, possess ourselves so that we can give of ourselves.

As for the unknown self, we are a mystery to others and to ourselves. We are not a mystery only to God. In this sense, we can compare ourselves to an iceberg: there is a large part of our personality that is not directly and voluntarily accessible, like a database for which I do not have the password.

However, it is not entirely concealed and locked away like a safe. There are moments and circumstances in which the unconscious reveals itself; these are moments that are out of our control and which we must take advantage of. We can say that these are messages that our unconscious sends to the conscious, messages that must be understood, decoded, and used in daily life.

Lapsus Linguae: These are statements we inadvertently make without meaning to and sometimes out of context; this is what people call "a slip of the tongue” that reveals the truth. It is a way the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious. Since they are unconscious, the person who says them is not aware of them, but a friend or a therapist can reveal them through feedback.

Dreams: We all dream, we always dream and dreams are always exclusively about us. Each object, each character, is part of us. Dreams are always subjective, never objective: if I dream about my father, it is not truly him I am dreaming about but the kind of relationship I have with him, how I perceive him, etc.

Working on or analyzing a dream is like traveling into the subconscious. Often, dreams are metaphorical, phantasmagorical, or even ridiculous; these are ways the unconscious draws our attention to something.

Body Language: What I say, what I do, is conscious; body language is unconscious, only the other person is aware of it and can interpret it. Because it is unconscious, what I say through body language is truer than what I say out aloud. In fact, as we say in Portuguese, "gesture is everything”, and much of our communication is non-verbal. It says more than what I say in words because I do not control it.

Growing as a human being is synonymous with growing in self-knowledge. This knowledge is not solely the result of introspection; a psychotherapist once said that no amount of introspection or self-examination will be enough to know ourselves. We can analyze ourselves for weeks or meditate for months and not advance even an inch; it is like trying to smell our own breath or making ourselves laugh by tickling ourselves.

Introspection is obviously a factor in the process toward greater self-knowledge, but it is not the only one. The process consists of two other factors that act in the form of a dynamic triangle.

What I learn about myself through introspection is complemented by feedback from people who are important to me; in this way, the four selves are harmonized and somehow fused into a single self. When I live in a loving relationship with people who care about me, their feedback can help me know more and more about my unconscious.

The Adventure of Living  
"The situation makes the thief" – Feedback on who I truly am is not always given to me by others, but by the situations in which I find myself and the experiences I go through. Mistakes, failures and successes say more about me than introspection. To know who I am, I must observe my behavior, whether or not I meet what is expected of me. I can only know if I have a talent when I try to use it when the time is right.

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained" – I do not know whether or not I have a talent until the day I am confronted by a situation that requires it. Winston Churchill and what he represented to England in World War II cannot be understood without it. It was this man's response to the challenge of the moment, WWII, that made him great. Heroes, saints, are made and known when they are put to the test, when faced with great challenges.

Tools for Self-Knowledge
There are psychological theories that have become very popular and can help people know themselves better. In the line of religion and mysticism, we have the Enneagram; in the line of Freud's existential psychology, we have Transactional Analysis; in Jung's line, we have Myers/Briggs.

Conclusion - Self-knowledge is an ongoing and never-complete process of uncovering who we are, harmonizing our talents and limitations in order to live with meaning, purpose and authenticity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Self-Consciousness

But when he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father...” Luke 15:17-18

The moment the prodigal son asked his father for his share of the inheritance, he was dazzled by the prospect of the pleasures that awaited him, and while those pleasures lasted, he was out of his mind. Often, pleasure makes people unrealistic and unconscious, while pain has the power to bring them back to reality, as happened with this young man.

From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
Before the "Big Bang”, which occurred about 15 billion years ago, all the matter of the cosmos existed in the form of an invisible subatomic particle that was extremely dense and hot, which eventually exploded, giving rise to the expanding universe. As temperatures started to cool down, the atoms that make up matter began to cluster into increasingly complex molecules, which came together to form membranes that gave rise to primitive cells.

All forms of life on Earth—viruses, microbes, bacteria, plants, animals, and humans—share common elements, since they all come from a common trunk. The cell is the simplest form of life; the first organisms formed on Earth were unicellular, like the amoeba, which still survives today in the contaminated waters of Africa. The transition from single-celled organisms to more complex life forms composed of multiple cells took about 3 billion years.

Since life comes from a common trunk, we can conclude that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis, meaning that the process of development of an individual of the human species, from conception to adulthood, recapitulates or synthesizes the history of life on this planet. Our organism in its adult state is composed of about 37 trillion cells; but at the moment of our conception, when half a cell from our father joins half a cell from our mother, we too started off as single-celled organisms

What happens at the level an individual reflects what happens at a global level; life that began with a single cell has diversified into many species of living beings over billions of years of evolution. In similar way, from the moment of our conception until we are fully formed independent beings still inside our mothers, the evolution of species is recapitulated.

From birth to adulthood, we relive human evolution that, five million years ago, began to diverge from the primates, our closest ancestors. Just as a baby first learns to walk and then to talk, humanity has also evolved to the point of self-consciousness. In the context of evolution, for Karl Marx, Man is the moment when Nature becomes aware of itself.

Self-consciousness is the capacity for introspection; it is to turn inward, recognizing oneself as a different and separate individual from the environment and other individuals. Self-consciousness is the subdivision or duplication of the individual who becomes at the same time both the subject and the object of his own thoughts.

Cogito ergo sum, said Descartes, but it can also be said senso ergo sum: I feel joy or sadness, pleasure or pain, therefore I exist. Self-consciousness is the meaning I attribute to my day-to-day experiences in the overall context of what my life is for me.

Someone once said that we are awake when we sleep, and asleep when we are awake. We become aware of who we really are during sleep, in dreams. Dreams reveal our true identity, because no matter how many characters appear in them, they are merely parts of ourselves.

Freud and all of psychology thereafter placed great importance on dreams, as they hold one of the keys to our true identity. When we are awake, we wear masks that not only veil our identity from others but also from ourselves. In fact, the word person means just that: mask, characters we portray during the day.

Being Alive is Not the Same as Living
A life that is not self-reflective is not worth living. Socrates (469 BC)

At around the age of 7, children become aware of themselves, that they exist, that they are alive, but at the same time, they also become aware of their finitude, that they will not always exist, that one day they will cease to exist as they do now. It is death that gives meaning to life; or rather, it is the existence of death that drives us to seek meaning in life.

In this sense, being alive is not the same as living. Animals are alive, but since they do not know that they will cease to exist one day, they end up not knowing that they exist, that they are alive; since they do not know they are alive, they do not live. They do not live because they do not have much power and control over their own lives; they blindly obey their instincts, thus functioning as automatons.

Only human beings really live because they understand that, between the present of their lives and a sure death, they have the time and energy to shape what they desire from their existence.

To Be Conscious Is to Turn Off the Autopilot
Often, I lock my car with the remote control, and after walking away a short distance, I ask myself if I had really locked it; if I am not sure, I walk back to the car and check. Like this, we all do things automatically without thinking—things we do routinely without being conscious of them at the moment of doing them.

More often than we care to admit, we have the autopilot on: our behavior is reactive, much like that of animals; a given stimulus is followed by a given response, predicted and predictable. When we behave as if we are on autopilot, we lack awareness; we are not in ourselves but outside of ourselves.

What we say or do is not the result of a proactive decision after assessing the reality or situation, but of a more or less instinctive, pre-determined, repetitive, and routine reaction. Something akin to a reflex, like when I involuntarily pull my hand away from a hot surface to avoid getting burned.

• To be aware means to realize everything that is happening inside and outside of oneself.
• To be aware means to be installed in the present, in the here and now.
• To be aware means to have the soul where the body is.
• To be aware means to self-observe.
• To be aware is to be fully present in each of one’s thought, sensation, emotion, and action.

Prayer is an Exercise of Self-Awareness
When the prodigal son came to himself, he returned to the Father; while he was far from the Father, he was also far from himself; while he was outside of his Father’s home, he was also outside of himself; while he was dissociated, divorced, with his back to God, he was also dissociated, divorced, and with his back to himself.

Deus interior intimo meo, said St. Augustine, God is nearer to us than our innermost being, therefore prayer is not only an encounter with God but also an encounter with oneself; it is not only a dialogue with God but also a dialogue with oneself. Prayer is first and foremost an exercise of self-consciousness.

Those who pray know themselves better than those who do not pray. If God, as St. Augustine says, is beyond our innermost being, beyond ourselves, we cannot reach God without first passing through ourselves; we cannot know God without first knowing ourselves better.

Conclusion - In moving from an unconscious existence to a profound self- awareness, we realize that to live is not just to exist; it is to shape our destiny, becoming the conscious author of our own story.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC