Knowing Thyself Through a Living Mirror
Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon.
What does it mean to live well? Is there an art to living, of being human? Wisdom traditions the world over have asked these very questions, and they have come to varying answers, but among all the variations and appearances of difference there are also clear threads running through them.
After all, a human in the Americas, in Asia, Europe, Africa, humans, humans, humans, humans all around. So one would suspect to find threads, features, ways of being human, some common tissue that connects us to one another. After all, all of us humans are thinking, reasoning, copying creatures and so we share, at the most fundamental levels, a whole lot in common. We share cognition and consciousness, for one. We all have a sense of self, for another. We all suffer, have fears, anxiety, likes, dislikes, wants, needs. It is from this shared place—our humanness—that we move out into the world. We do this from the standpoint of our self, most often. This self we move out in to the world from forms over the course of our lives and is in many ways solidified by our 20s. This self is filled with experiences, those experiences create memories, and those memories we form into episodes, in the form of stories. Stories about our likes, dislikes, wants, needs, opinions, judgments, and these become our identities, our stories, our frames we look out into the world from and through which the world is filtered, as it and other humans, come into relationship with us in some form. Some of our stories are given to us: by our culture, our religion, our government, our parents, our friends, and they make up a narrative we call our self, that I call, “Me.”
And many people and traditions, and many of their living, breathing, thinking, feeling bodies, spirits, and selves over the course of our “long” history of humanity have sought to figure out, what it is to be human, what it is to live well as a human. And over and over, it seems a common thread that pops up across these peoples, cultures, and traditions is the mandate to “Know thyself.”
That self, the one that we move from and out into the world, is our cognitive access to the world. Our experiences and our stories about those experiences, the emotions, states of mind, and feelings, that are bound up in the memories we make stories from are our point of reference, standpoint, and they become our frames through which we see the world. Though we have new and novel and changing experiences every moment of every day, we see them filtered through the Self, which judges them. In judging them, our self imposes a projection on our experience of reality. Our judgment of what takes place has arisen for many good reasons. For instance, you have an actual need to know the difference between a bear charging you and a frog that is just leaping across the ground, because your actual physical survival depends on you distinguishing and judging between them. Thus, it was good for us to develop shared stories about them, so we can know what will kill us and what won’t. So, that self, is kinda good and kinda necessary. So are the stories. But that judging and the stories can also go too far as well. When they go too far they can prevent us from seeing what actually is, both inside ourselves and outside in our environment. This can lead to self-deception, this can lead to self-destruction, this can lead to us putting ourselves in harm’s way. Just as a crack of a twig in a forest does not necessarily mean a bear is waiting around the tree ready to pounce, sometimes, what we hear someone say, is not what they actually said, or even intended to say, but if we always associate a certain sensation arising in our body, with say a certain word like fear, or assume every crack of a twig in a forest is a bear waiting to eat us, we can miss out on important information or relationships.
Many sensations may be good indicators of fear, but just automatically assuming, a feeling in my stomach is fear rather than being with the sensation with my attention, without reference to the label “fear,” I may instead learn through observation, that it was really excitement, or maybe even, just a passing sensation with no meaning behind it. I may learn (by inquiring into that sensation through observation and suspending judgment) about something in my life, perhaps an event, a story around the event that I once told myself long ago, that created an automatic association with that sensation in my body. Maybe it protected me from physical harm or emotional harm in that moment the story was created, so it was good for me then to make the association of that idea to that sensation, but maybe I will now learn that that event is in the past, that what is right now, in this moment, just a sensation, and I don’t need to have that story connected to it any longer. I may learn that connecting that event to that bodily sensation may be actually preventing me from being open and vulnerable with the people closest to me. Once this happens, my story can change, my self can change, and my frames will become a little clearer to me. But to do this, I have to look, and while looking I have to suspend my judgment that sensation A equals idea B.
To do this is but one of the ways to begin to “know thyself.” Often undertaking this work alone can be arduous, difficult, confusing, and perhaps impossible, because we can become so bound up within our stories and frames that we forget they are not us. That is why Socrates in Alcibiades I suggests that the path of self-knowledge begins by looking into another person’s pupils to see our reflection which is the beginning of seeing ourselves. In other words, we need to engage with others in close relationship and dialogue to begin to truly know who and what we are, past the stories we live our “Self” through.
This dialogue, the reflection of you in the living mirror is the starting point of philosophical counseling. In this process, you have a trained professional who through attentive listening, and gentle guidance of dialogue and inquiry, is there to help you see yourself, as you are, to help you see your sensations, see your stories, see the connections you make between them, not to get rid of them, but to truly see them, explore them, and through that observation, come to know your self as it comes into the light of your awareness shining in the living mirror of dialogue.