Bruce Lee once said "All type of knowledge ultimately mean self-knowledge". I read this quote when I was still 17 years old and I did not understand it at first. It took me two decades to finally decode what it means. I was a fool chasing knowledge everywhere all my life when the ultimate knowledge I was seeking can only be found with in me.
We all grew up being taught to understand dozens of laws and rules to be followed in life. The law of God, the house rules, the law of the land, the rules of the schools etc. etc. But no one seriously told us to understand ourselves. We all grew up neglecting the most important subject, the most important object, the most important person and the mot important being in this world.. ...our selves.
Each one of us is unique. Each one of us is different. Deep within each of us is a law. Did I say Law? Yes. Law!
We are all born with an inner law written inside us. That inner law must be obeyed or observed most the time. We can ignore that inner law for a while but not for long. Because if we do, we end up confused, unhappy and discontented.
How many times we followed other people's advise and ended up with regrets? How many times we tried to please people against our own desires and ended up miserable? This is because we ignored and violated the inner laws dictated by our hearts, conscience and intuitions.
Understanding one's self is not as easy as filling up answers in a psychological test. Our brains and logic does not represent the entirety of ourselves. We humans are very complicated beyond imagination. We use logic and fairness to answer a theoritical question while we used emotions and self-preservation in real situation.
Knowing and understanding ourselves is a lifetime endeavor. It takes real pain, real danger, real threats and real temptations to truly see the angels and monsters in each of us. By knowing ourselves properly, we can properly steer clear our selves from situations that makes us mosters and drive our selves to situations that makes us angels.
Our reactions to real situations are the true us. Some of us can control our reactions but the majority cannot. Some can learn from a real situations and adjust later but others cannot. Each of us have different strenght and weaknesses in different challenges and situation. Knowing them is the first step to self-knowledge.
A good example of testing our selves is to write the things we want to buy IF we have an unobligated free cash of P20,000.00 and the actual things we bought ONCE we have the actual unobligated free cash. 9 out of 10 people will spend that money diffrently from the list they made.
To be continued...
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