Working on Oneself

Brother Z. recently offered a beautiful cue with the words “Know Thyself.” Knowing that this is one of the silver threads that first drew me to this circle of people, I would like to share a few reflections of my own.

“Working on oneself” is a phrase I have spent the last few years questioning, dissecting, turning over, and searching for deeper meaning. It has begun to trouble me. I hear it more and more often. I see it less and less.

I have no desire to speak about others; I wish only to reflect what is, for now, my own truth on this subject. To truly know oneself, I believe, is neither possible nor necessary.

Pause for a moment. Take a breath.

Human beings are not finite. In a sense, we are infinite.

To keep discovering, rather than to discover.
To travel, rather than to arrive.

What I have come to understand while searching for answers about the self is that our nature—the nature of the human being, the soul embodied in physical form—is an immeasurable field of awareness shaped by experience. And experience itself is infinite.

We are given the capacity to be good and evil, wise and foolish, gentle and harsh, quiet and loud, often all at once.

And what do we, as people, tend to do?

We seek to know ourselves completely and finally.

We search for some ultimate truth about who we are, as though it existed at the end of an imagined road. As though it were not as alive and changing as we ourselves are.

We seek words, experiences, feelings, and ideas with which to define ourselves and hold ourselves still—as if we were a finished structure, complete and unchanging.

And yet, if we are works of art, then we are living works of art. True works of art are never confined by a single dimension, a single moment, or a single interpretation.

Dear Brothers and Sisters, while accepting that I will never fully succeed, I wish to stretch myself across the entire field of experience and awareness—to explore as much of it as I can.

When the question arises of how one might attempt such a thing, Brother L. introduced a beautiful concept: intuition—that primordial remembrance of the Self that exists far beyond the limits of the physical body.

The knowledge of oneself, if I may offer my present truth, lies much farther from reason and self-analysis than we imagine, and much closer to that subtle, timeless part of us that no one can truly teach us to find.

Perhaps that very search—the search for the right doorway—is the thread from which meaning itself is woven.

... and thus, I have spoken.