The Key to Knowing Your True Self

Why are so many people struggling to feel happy these days?

The answer is very simple. Because most people don’t really want it. They may think they do and signal and gesture that they do but, on another level, (subconscious sabotage) they don’t. This is also because there is confusion and conflict within most people that stop them from taking effective steps and actions.

Not only this but transformation into a healthy and happy version of yourself is also challenging because we have lost the WAY to effectively achieve this.

Most people have forgotten to value or know much of mastery or higher purpose in action and without a correct understanding and path of what it means to really transform into that, they will most probably misunderstand what it means to be a master of themselves even if they are told.

The first and most important thing to become a more aligned and healthier being that is even able to start the path of mastery Is to really want it.

To want it so much that it becomes a very significant and consistent desire within yourself over time. It does not have to be a specific vision or behavior but a general trend of desire to be your best. To be masterful, elite, self-controlled and heroic in your life. Not because you want to have power over others or make yourself better than others but because you thirst for more. Because you want to serve and express yourself in your true potential manifest.  

 

Change of your character and inner being cannot be a simple passing desire, or a vague fantasy of change based on momentary dissatisfaction and reaction to external conditions.

 

This kind of motivation may give you short impulses to do something different for a time and to apply some new perspective or tools, but ultimately without a deeper structure and strategy it will not create an effectively sufficient drive to really do the work of becoming a master of yourself.

 

The evolution of a human depends on the understanding of what they may get (expanded and more fulfilling meaning and experience) and what they must give (the relinquishing of self-sabotage, illusion and negative self-destructive tendencies) in order for it to really happen.

If man does not truly want to master himself, or if he does not want it strongly enough, and does not make committed necessary efforts over his lifetime, he will never truly achieve the aim of self-mastery.

 

The truth is that most people don’t know their own limitations or possibilities.

They do not even know to how much they don’t know themselves.

Throughout the past century humans have invented many sophisticated machines and technologies, and we know that complex machines and technologies need a great deal of study and understanding to be able to really understand them.

An aerospace engineer or a computer technician can take years of careful studying and practice before they are capable of effectively doing their job.

We can understand that to become proficient and masterful with any skill, it will take many thousands of hours. Why then is it so difficult to apply this same expectation and discipline to the knowledge and mastery of our self?

A human being is much more miraculous and complicated than any known technology or machine we have invented.

The sad situation is that most people have all sorts of wrong ideas about themselves.  First and foremost, the typical person does not realise let alone acknowledge that they are susceptible to conditioning and programming. We can understand an algorithm in a computer system but we can't see it in ourselves.

 

Most humans are programmed and behave more or less like a machine.

 

What does that really mean?

 

It means that without self-awareness and training, humans tend to fall back on unconscious habits that limit their ability to think independently and create the freedom inside or outside of themselves that they truly desire.

Many people are unfortunately just going through the motions of life. They have been taught to live without much more than the basic choice to react to thoughts, feelings, and experiences based on the past.

When we forget about our creative and transformative capacities, all our movements, actions, words, ideas, emotions, moods and thoughts are produced from the past, triggered by external influences.

This is a dangerous position to be in because at this point, we really do become robot like.
An organic automaton running on old software.

 

We must understand that without the vision of transformation and a healthy connection to our true potential we can do nothing with any real effectiveness.

 

Most people do not realise this, yet they like to believe they are free and they are masterful, being unaware that they are stuck in a herd like mentality of simplistic reactive living.This is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. That we are free when we are not, that we are powerful and smart when we are weak and know little.

  

An unconscious human cannot move, think, or speak for themselves because they don’t even know what their self is. Living an unconscious life is like being a marionette pulled here and there by invisible strings.

If you understand this, maybe you can learn more about yourself, and possibly then things may begin to change for you.

We are very interesting creatures because we are programmed but given the proper circumstances we can know we are programmed, and if we realise how and why we have been programmed in a given way, we can find the ways to step out of this programming or create more appropriate and effective conscious programs.

Unfortunately our lives don't come with instruction manuals on how to live our best, most meaningful and authentic lives. 

If you sincerely apply yourself to figuring it out and look into what it takes to construct your own manual of how you work from reliable and effective sources you may be able to make yourself a lot more functional and in reflection your life may become a lot more fulfilling.

This begins with observing the inner mechanics of your mind. Tracking how you operate, react,  judge, and lie. 

 

When you can track things and understand them, things run much smoother. You have more ability to shed neurosis and expand and adopt functional adaptive awareness.

 

This is the Great Work. The pursuit of excellence and harmony with your true nature. It is the exploration and unification with your highest and best potentials. Just like the ideal of the impeccable warrior or the masterful sage, you become the centre of a journey into conscious creation and knowing yourself.

 

This includes the curious pursuit and direct experiential analysis of your consciousness and the nature of existence itself.

 

Some questions to pursue here are:

 

What is the ultimate truth and context of my existence?

What is the platform from which my life and experience arises?

What is Chaos?

What is Emptiness?

What is Consciousness? 

What is myself?

What are the levels or dimensions of my “selfing” experience?

What are the focused and contexts that myself is engaged in?

What are the focused and contexts that are actually important and valuable for my “self” to engaged in? 

What is my relationship to others? (focus on specific contexts and individuals as well as in general

What is important to understand about others that I relate to?

What is my actually important and valuable in my relationship to others? 

What is the world to me and how do I relate with is?

What contexts and domains of focus do I interact with in my life?

What is important to understand about the world? 

What is meaningful

What is useful?

What is valuable and important to you and why?

 

The idea here is to begin to explore and track your actual experience and personal relationship to it. 

 

What do you spend your time and energy on?

 

If you are like most people you find yourself absorbed into a life of varied distractions and problems.

 

The process of self-liberation and transformation is a serious project that requires time and focus, it is more realistically a long-term project.

 

It requires that you observe and acknowledge your conditioning and habitual behaviours. Your Thoughts, anger, addictions, Judgments, obsessive compulsive behaviours.

 

Ask yourself how different your life would be If you could control these things.

 

(If you want an exercise write as many reasons as you can WHY this would be a good thing and the result of this. What is important about being successful in your own self mastery and transformation. Write 30 or more reasons.

 

Conversely write 30 or more reasons of what will happen if you do not do something about this and you fail?)

 

If we know it’s so good to be a master of our habits and behaviours How come it’s so difficult to change?

 

Maybe you struggle with the following:

 

• Smoking
• Drinking
• Sex addictions
• Struggle with success and money
• Issues with family members
• Perfectionism and self-doubt
• Workaholism
• Losing weight or being healthy

 

These are all symptoms of conditioning and self-awareness that’s out of order.

 

It's common that we get conditioned and taught these unconscious strategies from others that just winged it themselves. This is to be expected because most people are unaware and thus, they teach others unawareness. Blind leading the blind.

 

If you think you are already aware without training and skills in self-inquiry and mastery. If you think you have free will and that you are a self-willing individual, you run the risk of claiming greatness before you have attained it. You may instead be lulled into not bothering to try and get yourself together.

 

Without the clarity of your own or others' errors and suffering, how could you identify the work required?

 

What would give you the references to find a way to move ahead?

 

It is necessary for a person to know how limited they really are and how bad it really is before they will have the drive to do the work and commit to what’s required for success and this is why most people will not develop themselves.

 

The good news is, it possible to acquire command over the fleeting moments of real connection and awareness of consciousness. You can learn to evoke them more often, and to keep them longer in your focus and nervous system, or even make them permanent in your psyche.

When this is understood, and it must be understood at the very beginning of this study, that this point even as a solid theory has been entirely missed by must psychological and self-development schools. It is a rare exception to find a clearly laid out path and structure for effectiveness and self-mastery.

 

But with right methods and efforts a human can acquire self-awareness and heightened control of consciousness, and can become conscious of the truth of Self.

 

This study must begin with the investigation of obstacles to awakened consciousness in ourselves, because consciousness can only begin to grow when particular obstacles are removed.

 

We must understand self-development and psychology really means the study and mastery of self in reality.

 

One cannot study the nature of consciousness and true self development as separate from your self-experience. This is not like an objective science that is approached as apart from oneself. This is an empirical study of what is true and important, what the principles of reality and self really are.

 

 

 

 

Like any technology we must become familiar with it before we can use it properly. Its chief functions, the conditions of effectiveness vs dysfunction and maladaptive limitations, and the causes of those dysfunctions. The learning and mastery of this technology of self is difficult to describe without using a specific and dedicated language.

 

As with all great and important fields of study there is a need for a literacy and competency of explanation of the important aspects of the technology you are working with. In other words, you need to be able to understand define and explain at least some of the most important parts of the technology otherwise you literally have no labels to hang your ideas and understandings on.

 

It is necessary to have an effective map in order to be able to study the terrain of the self.

The Self is like the planet. There's different landscapes and within those landscapes there are diverse conditions and functions that are specific to that environment. Let's explore the different landscapes of the Self. 

The human being has seven different functions:

 

1. Thinking (or intellect).
2. Feeling (or emotions).
3. Unconscious function (all inner work of the organism).
4. Physiological function (all outer work of the organism, movement in space, and so on). Sexual drive and identity (the function of procreation, unification and elevation through the two principles, male and female, in all their manifestations)
5. Awareness (The function of consciousness in its paw form of presence)
6. Connection and mapping meaning of relationship of self to others

 

As mentioned before, it’s important that we study what obstacles are present and relative to our personal and collective consciousness. In short, the lying, the distractions, the criticisms, the negative reactions that you respond to. The more you see these things, the more you open the path to your meta awareness.

 

The main features of our self-perpetuating obstacles are:

 

1. Lying
2. Imagining fantasies that take you away from reality
3. Talking to yourself and others in distracting ways
4. Negative emotions
5. Distractions that simply take you away from yourself
6. Criticism and judgment

Lying

The illusions you are invested in that serve you to uphold your idea of yourself and the world. Unchecked assumptions…

Imagining

Fantasy mode of the future and the past. Telling yourself about all the things that you need to do or want to do or should of done or should do. This robs you of your free NOW consciousness.

Talking

You're talking all the time to yourself. Instead of self-observation you are talking and making up stories all the time. This is a manifestation of not being able to be silent. Afraid of silence.

Negative emotions

Emotions that pull you into unconscious reactions.

Distraction 

All the things that distract you from developing awareness. Perfecting your image for others, Entertainment, sensational pursuit, artifices of modern society

External criticism and judgment 

Focusing your judgment and criticism on others. It’s a giant sham. Your life is expiring and you're not looking inward.

  

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The overarching intent is to live in a spirit of love, peace, and harmony with self, others, and nature and willingly want to smooth out personal inconsistencies in the name of truly understanding how your mind and true nature works.

 

To learn about meditation, awareness, connection, transformation and will or lack of it.

 

Until you recognise the urgency of such a course of action you are more or less asleep.

 

An integral part of the process is to move along the path from an unconscious human to an awakened, whole, and consciously creative human. Seeing and accepting that there is a map to change and you are on that journey of learning to use it and make it your own is only the first step.

 

Once you realise the purpose of life in some sense is to reclaim and be worthy of your own sovereignty, you begin to see the absurdities and contradictions inherent in all of us. You begin to see that a vast amount of humanity is experiencing life in an unconscious and generally self-absorbed existence.

It does not mean that you as the one that sees this, are better or that you have some right or power that others don’t but you do  become increasingly capable of understanding and ideally navigating yourself through those people that live in sleep. (rephrase this)

It is quite amazing that most of society operates thanks to the many that do everything in sleep, and do not know that they are asleep. If you are recently awakening from this sleep yourself, you know it all too well and you may have great empathy and compassion for those unconscious others.

This is also the birth of the heroic ideal to serve and awaken those that are ready to. To take the quest and find others to work with the tools and skills you have acquired and do your best with what you have.

 

It is very important to understand one of the most common and powerful obstacles on the path of self-development and mastery of consciousness, is the pride of the egoic self.

The “ego” is a word that gets used a lot and, in many ways, misused. This is a tricky thing with language because we hear words that have been used in multiple ways and they often become warped and misinterpreted.

In my definition of ego, it is like an avatar of your true self. It includes your personas and sense of identified self. Think of it like a character that you occupy.

The interesting thing about the “Ego” is that likes to think it is in control and it wants to have a kind of lock down on your experience. It is not very happy or excited about you discovering yourself outside of its defined rules so it seductively keeps you misdirected and occupied.

You become hooked on some part of your self-image which makes you feel proud.

 

There is nothing wrong with being certain and confident but when you are certain and confident about a false identity it just traps you in an illusion. This is why dogma in religion, or any field of study is dangerous. Dogma is only useful as a means to an end. The same goes for yourself. Your ego and its personas as only useful as a means to expressing and knowing your true nature.

 

The false self-image convinces you that you already possess self-mastery and high levels of proficiency over your life when you actually know little about the reality of your consciousness and life purpose.This is a trap for many beginners on the path.

The world is full of people trying to tell others how to live yet they have not really learned to walk their own path first.    

 

Another form of this egoic complacency is the sense that we can always start later. Or that we have the required abilities and qualities to succeed we just have not done anything about it yet.

This false sense of I could but I don’t need to do it now is really a kind of distractive safety blanket. The fact is that when you really apply yourself to something, you learn the real truth about the situation. Only with meeting reality with your actual experience will you find if your assumptions are correct of not.

 

Many people are afraid to check their assumptions because they assume if they do not get what they desire in reality it means that some part of their self-image is wrong and therefore it's better and more comfortable to just avoid testing it for fear of failing and needing to face some real uncomfortable feeling that is under the surface like unworthiness.

When our ego is invested in something It is very difficult to see outside that investment unless we are willing to question and really check it.

This makes change particularly difficult for most people because they are afraid their sense of self (Which is really their false sense of egoic self) is not good enough. This is actually true by the way because a false image of our self will never be satisfying or good enough compared to knowing our true nature.

 

The egoic sense of self is particularly difficult to see through though because it plays funny tricks on us. When we ask ourselves what is my “self”? Or how do I know what my self is? The mental idea of who we are (the egoic construct) produces all kinds of clever answers.

I am my body, my job, my history, my status, my name etc. This seems to be a satisfactory answer on a superficial level, but it fails to really cut deeper into what the nature of self really is.

If you press the ego to answer and look inside itself for its nature, it gets afraid and self-protective. It avoids and fights to maintain its habitual mental image of itself. This is in some sense the source of our greatest inner conflict.

 

If you ask yourself if you are really conscious and capable of being truly aware, it's a silly question because you are asking the question and thinking of answers. How could you not be aware? You must be aware in order to even understand the question right?

  

As long as you are trapped in a mental definition of your self-image alone, then you cannot even consider how asleep you are because the very mechanism of even experiencing what you are is inaccessible. The state of mental attachment to an idea of consciousness keeps your stuck.

 

This type of pattern goes for all kinds of mental models and templates that you hold about yourself and the world. Is that bad or good news? On one hand it is not so good because you are asleep. On the other you have a big potential to gain more awakening.

 

What might that mean? How much qualitative improvement might be possible if you became more aware?

  

Many people also think they are doing the right things to awaken themselves to their potential and they may be doing some good things but they are still in some sense asleep.

 

You might be doing some practices or studying already and think you are awakening yet you are only touching the surface of self mastery and you may even create a new level of egoic identification. Spiritual materialism and egoic attachment to significance and superiority only serves to actually halt your progress in true self growth and awareness.

 

The intention here is not demonise these tendencies either. Your habitual patterning is a vast and complex network of interrelated ideas and forces of nature which most people barely comprehend.

 

These functions and your egoic sense of identity is set up to perpetuate themselves automatically, and if you look into them clearly you ultimately find they are only survival mechanisms whose essential function is make sense of things by answering two important questions.

1) Who am I (In this given context).

2) How does it work? (How are you supposed to most effectively behave in a given context).

 

These two questions drive your sense of identity in any given moment and your ability to effectively answer them or not will define how you feel about yourself as well as how you will behave.

 

Maybe deep down inside we are not prepared to understand ourselves fully so we will hide behind our false assumptions to protect us from the potential ugly truth that:

1) We don’t know who we are and maybe we are meaningless and insignificant

2) We have no Idea how life really works or what it's about or how to really behave beyond serving our own self image.

 

The uncomfortable reality of not really applying yourself to a deeper path of self-transformation and mastery in alignment with your true nature is that if you try and avoid it, whatever you do to satisfy yourself will be a goose chase of desire fulfillment followed by dissatisfaction and doubt and frequently believing more and more is required.

You are always hungry but never fulfilled. This is what living with minimal awareness is like.

If we continue to worship our self-image above the pursuit and understanding of our true nature and its relationship to actual reality, deception begins to fill all our life.

Look around, people pretend that they know the truth about all sorts of things; about the world, about future life, about the universe, about the origin of and potential of humanity, about evolution, about everything.

In reality they more often than not miss the fundamental keys that allow them to really relate with and understand themselves, others, their environments, and their true mission and purpose.

In other words they do not know anything, especially about who they truly are. Consequently, the study of self-honesty and self-delusion  is of primary  importance on the journey of self mastery.

Self mastery needs to be particularly concerned with the tracking of self-delusions and misperceptions that take us away from our real self. Becoming profoundly aware of what you say and think about yourself and others and the world is where the work begins.

 

This can be extremely challenging for most people. We don’t want to think of ourselves as inauthentic and fake. We don’t want to admit our flaws and blind spots and challenge our complacency by honestly looking into our present and past for how we habitually create our own suffering.

We don’t want to face the responsibility of transforming our unrefined world view that is full of imitation and fallacy and transform it into a life of substance and value.

 

If you are honest you will find you are more invested in your collection of false notions and lazy assumptions than you would dare to admit to yourself. This is the crux of how you deceive yourself.

 

You say things that are half true in order to feel right, or good, or in control your life. You probably are not conscious of why or how these seemingly small and acceptable lies affect you and the quality of your relationship with your true nature. After all, you are just living your life as you believe it best be lived.

 

To know thyself

This was the first principle and the first demand of old psychological schools. We still remember these words, but for many of us they have lost their actual meaning.

We think that to know ourselves means to know our individual traits, desires, and preferences. The truth is we are divine beings and creatures of habit. The purpose of this knowing is so that when you see and understand the structure of your programming and habit, you can do something about it that is more functional and conscious and invite your otherwise sleeping potential to come and manifest through you.

 

To know thyself is to study its parts and functions of the different parts. To understand the conditions that influence your self’s parts and functions and to become a student of governing the self in a mature and healthy way.

 

A masterful human realises in a general way that they cannot know everything but at the same time they cannot have any real skill or personal transformation without some accurate understanding of what their true nature is and how it relates and is affected by the reality it is embedded within.

 

We must honor our desires to be masterful and conscious and to relate to ourselves in a healthy and purposeful way. You must study your own conditioning and strategies from the point of view of a creator.

  

You can begin today and this week. Start with what are you actually doing with your time? How are you using your focus? Can you write as much down as possible about what’s going in in your life and day?

 

What are the specific ways that you go unconscious in your day? How do you block or sabotage yourself? What habits are you using to compensate for your lack of satisfaction?

 

What are the specific ways that you lie, distract, judge, criticise, talk, get lost in fantasy and imagination, or get lost in ego and emotions?  This is the stuff that you should be studying to know yourself. Do this even for a day and you will be surprised at what you learn. Do it over a number of days or every few days until you have captured some decent data.

 

Such observations will very soon give results. First of all, you may notice that you resist and don’t want to track yourself. Next you may become frustrated that you are blind to many things and cannot observe everything you wish to master in your world.

You may find that you find it very time consuming or distracting to be aware of yourself. See if you can find effective but efficient ways of tracking yourself. Take voice notes. Keep a notepad or write notes in your phone or computer.

You may find that some thoughts and activities please you, especially when you meet desired expectations or fulfill some need that you are seeking. In other times you may find that you get annoyed, irritated or even disgusted by yourself.

Both of these circumstances are great and necessary. You are learning about your habits, goals, values, attachments, and beliefs. You cannot only study your life and self in objective detachment as if looking in a microscope at a curious creature.

 

Quite naturally you will begin to learn and discover what helps you development and what makes it more difficult, or even impossible. This means that very soon after starting to observe your self, he will begin to distinguish useful on track and off track behaviours. You will begin to understand what is useful and harmful in your perception and behaviours.

 

When you understand through first hand awareness and analysis what is useful or harmful to your pursuit of self mastery you will develop a sharper skill in sensing and shaping sides of yourself which can become more conscious, and sides which have become unconscious and must  be transformed into new consciousness and healthy aspects of your self uniting with its true nature .

 

This is the first step. 

The point of doing comprehensive and critical self-observation is to find what is deceptive and self-sabotaging to your true potential and happiness. Because you have inherent biases it may be hard to see what the ego cannot or will not see. 

It can be a horrific realization to finally accept the truth that you aspects of you are self-deceptive and self-sabotaging.  Investigating your self is more than a science. Science is not well equipped to study the inside of the mind mostly because it cannot prove subjectivity, so therefore is tries to deny its value and relevance to our human experience.

 

In the mean time  you have to do your own heavy lifting and observe yourself from the inside as non-bias and honestly as possible. If you observe yourself through a previously existing ideological frame of hand me down beliefs about yourself and the world provided by pre-existing ideological structures like religion or even strict atheism, it stops the free and true exploration of self in reality. 

 

 

 

 

Knowing things is not enough to liberate yourself. All the logical understanding in the world will not help you. Many of the ways that people see the world are actually viruses of the mind. Become aware of your lack of awareness and correct it to save yourself from suffering. This is the noble path of the romantic adventurer and spiritual warrior.  

 

Begin to track yourself this week and see what you find. If you are honest you will see that you are at odds with yourself in some sense. You will see that you have a fragmented nature. One part that works against you and your efforts and one that helps you promote your forward momentum.

Working with your true nature to create unification and self-transformation is what this is all about.

To find out more and get started on a path of real self-growth and development you cant check out more here (Enter upsell to the finding your current position program and basic self-tracking)