How to “Know Thyself” - from the instruction manual that came with the package

“Know Thyself” is a well-recognized motto from the ancient Greek philosophers and the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi, and in the twentieth century the soft science of psychology emerged to make a full time vocation of understanding who we are as a person. The science of the personality became well-established and went on to become accepted in the modern zeitgeist even up until today. And religions over the centuries have also attempted to nudge people in the direction of remembering their true “spiritual” identity and acting accordingly. (pic:pixabay)

Yet today, after the age of religion, in our post-Enlightenment era, we still - as a society - continue to pursue happiness based on a possibly limited understanding of our identity as consciousness. Psychology or psychiatry tended to focus on those who were mentally ill initially, though went on later to be the go-to place when modern man went in search of a soul, as Carl Jung titled his popular book. Historically society has generally lost faith in the priesthood, who were the counselors and confessors of the past, the guides of the soul who were supposed to shed some light during our individual “dark night of the soul” that we all sometimes encounter at certain points in our lives. That role of "psychopomp" fell to the psychiatrists, for better or worse.

It was, however, in the sixties that two interesting developments occurred in the field of “self-realization” for modern western civilization. At that time of transformation in the zeitgeist, young people became open to new ideas, having clearly shifted from the narrower, conservative mindset of their parents. The so-called “Hippy” generation began exploring not only new chemical discoveries like LSD that opened up their awareness to deeper insight into the personality, but psychiatry also began mapping the brain, decoding its make up chemically and thereby further expanding our knowledge of the mechanics of consciousness. Neuro-chemistry made profound inroads into understanding how our emotions or actually our entire personality was determined by chemistry. Mentally sick people were seen to be simply lacking the correct balance of brain chemicals. And so consciousness was mapped and tapped, deconstructed and reconstructed, and we realized that we could be a different person, even see the world in a different way just by supplementing with chemicals.

This made scientific sense and the science of the mind and personality had come a long way since the speculations of the Greeks two or three thousand years ago, and even the so-called Enlightenment of the post-Renaissance era in the west. However, it was not enough, in and of itself, to give a full picture. The sixties also brought to the western society a rare import from the east of something more in the field of personality and consciousness, namely the yoga texts of ancient India, which were finally translated from the Sanskrit and published by major printing houses like Macmillan. These texts shed light on the nature of the mind and psyche in a clear and philosophical manner that appeared even scientific, despite being thousands of years old. They alluded to a fundamental unchanging truth about the perennial philosophy of knowing the self. They revealed unimagined new information regarding the psyche (Greek for soul) that the western culture had never clearly understood until now.

This was also coupled by further developments in psychiatry by researchers like Professor Stan Grof, who pioneered a field that he called “transpersonal psychology”. With the aid of “holotropic breathwork” (already used by yogis) and sometimes even LSD, Grof broke new ground in the field of self-realization. To this day newer techniques are being discovered, this time from South America where shamans have also used chemical additives from plant matter, like Ayahuasca, to take people on journeys of consciousness, where they are able to glimpse a deeper understanding of themselves and life on earth in general.

These have all gone a long way to elucidating to us the workings of our own minds and psyches, particularly when all taken together for a fuller understanding of the self. One without the other might not give a complete picture. Neuroscientists today may be able to map and tweak personality with chemicals, much like the shamans and psychiatrists, but without a proper labeling and understanding, we have spent many decades throughout our historical quest for consciousness in the dark, or at best speculating or concocting an imagined understanding of ourselves based on trial and error.

It is, however, with the addition of authoritative texts on yoga – the original science of consciousness – that we can really practice the aphorism of “Know Thyself”. And it is by comparing and cross-referencing the various diverse schools of thought and their insights that we can get a fuller picture as well as see the shared themes to really know that we are onto something valid and true. If we find correlations among the scientific as well as mystic or metaphysical field of thought, then we can be sure we are all experiencing the same thing, we are all arriving at a valid truth that is relevant for all of us.

For example it appears that we all have the identical brain, made up of two hemispheres and we all react to certain chemical additives in a similar way. We know enough about the self or the brain to be able to determine that much. Of course the real question then arises - “are we our brain, does the brain make the mind and personality or vice versa?” With new insights come further unanswered questions that we can only speculate about, all leaving us feeling just as uncertain about the nature of the self or who we really are than ever, despite all the insights.

We know how the machine of the body and brain now work. Medical science has provided that much. And we know something about the more subtle mind, with its ego, personality and habits. We know that with neuroplasticity we can continually grow and mold the brain functioning, and change our minds. So if we can change the mind then who are we? Who is the observer doing the changing of the mind. Certainly we are not the mind, if it can be changed to such an unrecognizable degree, and yet we are still the same person. Our personality can and does change, yet we stay the same, or so it seems from our subjective observer point of view.

Fortunately the Sanskrit yoga texts describe our identities to us, comprising of body, mind, intelligence, ego, and that other invisible core called the soul, or spirit or source of consciousness, according to different interpretations of this elusive item by the layman without the terminology or insight. Fortunately humans have been practicing the art or science of self-realization for millennia, and in previous ages, thousands of years ago already, some were able to hear from those who were already self-realized and follow their scientific formulas to obtain the same result, namely self-realization.

Thousands of years ago already yogis knew what it took modern psychiatrists and neuroscientists decades to discover. In other words, science came to the same conclusion as mysticism had in the distant past the former by the ascending process of trial and error, and the latter by the descending process of receiving the knowledge from either a person already enlightened, or perhaps something even more transcendent, from the source of consciousness itself, whether within their own hearts, or externally, or both simultaneously, since consciousness and source is within and without and in fact all-pervading.

Science today has come full circle and is beginning to reach the same point as mysticism in its understanding of life, personality and consciousness. You will hear western scholars on the subject agree that the mind is an antenna picking up consciousness from a non-localized all-pervading source outside of the brain and body. In other words they will tell you that “you” are not limited to your physical vehicle of the body. OOBEs (out of body experiences) allude to something similar. And the most obvious point revealing that we are not the body or mind occurs when consciousness leaves the body during the time of coma or death. Even in a coma, all the parts are there, the body and brain, but where is consciousness? Similarly at death, all the parts that made you are there, but all we see is an inanimate corpse. The body and brain are present but the person is gone.

To conclude, we can all take advantage of the multiple fields of science available to us today, namely neuro-chemistry, psychiatry and yoga to really get a complete understanding, at least theoretically, of who we are. To understand ourselves more directly, we will have to apply the techniques of yoga to gain the realization which goes beyond the theory. Then we will really “Know Thyself” in an intimate, personal subjective way. Bhagavad Gita, the most popular yoga text, lists in its 700 verses the nature of consciousness and the techniques to attain full consciousness, going beyond the mere biochemical level of mind and ego to the eternal transcendent. For example one of my favorite verses, which I have memorized both in the Sanskrit and English during my studies is the following:

देहिनोऽस्मिन्यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा ।
तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति ॥ १३ ॥

tv evāhaṁ jātu nāsaṁ
na tvaṁ neme janādhipāḥ
na caiva na bhaviṣyāmaḥ
sarve vayam ataḥ param

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”

Bhagavad Gita as it is ch 2:12 translated by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta

Here the fundamental truth of our identity as self is explained in more detail than any psychiatrist can when it says that the self is eternal. We have existed before this body and we continue to exist after this body is finished. When you know the self to have these parameters, it shrinks the current lifetime into perspective as one of an eternal line of lives, or perhaps rather one eternal life with numerous changes of body through which to express the same self. Knowing this really sets the standard or the priority and perspective as to who we are and thereby what is important. Without this understanding the rest of the scientific knowledge of self is limited and potentially misdirecting. And this insight is just the start.