KNOW THYSELF

KNOW THYSELF

Erle Frayne Argonza

Know thyself!

That sounds like a tall order of a command. It really is no command but a task, a lifelong task. It fused together ‘know’ and ‘self’, the task being to ‘know the self’ in its totality.

Self-knowledge is knowledge of a very high order. This we mystics are very much aware of. We regard self-discovery as the last frontier, the frontier of ‘inner space’. To be able to make adventures in ‘inner space’ and discover truths along the way is the very task of a seeker or knower.

To take it for granted that you already know yourself, or pretend that you know yourself 105%, is pure hubris. On the other hand, to be so disabled from knowing the self, so much that you cannot even think of qualities that indicate your personality and level of psychological integration, is a mark of deep fragmentation and disorder. Both tendencies must be discarded.

It pays to know the self. Today’s gurus of success are very right in their contention that persons who have greater insights about themselves get to become more successful than those who don’t. Robert Kiyosaki and John Maxwell, who are on top of this chain of success gurus, have declared this contention very explicitly and kept on re-echoing it in their various writings.

Know the self well, as this is the way to a more successful future. This is another way of writing the formula. To put it in mathematical language:

Success = fn (self-insight)

Success = A + B X (Self-insight)

Where A = Goals in life

B= Pace of acknowledgement and absorption of self-insight

The Teaching is so filled with methods for self-insight, methods and information that past gurus have already shared to the world. You can go ahead and study them well.

Take a look at astrology and numerology. They are examples of methods for self-analysis and insight devised by masters in antiquity. It pays to study them well. The better if you do the study yourself rather than rely all the time on an external agent (numerologist, astrologer) to do the analysis for you. There are information packages that would be best for you to find out for yourself, as you derive the information intuitively.

As a young yogi in the making, I did study numerology and practice its analytical powers on myself and my former students (1980s, 90s). Numerology, using the combined Pythagorean-Chaldean methods, worked so wondrously that each person done with a reading exclaimed their mighty accuracy of up to 90% most often. The lowest self-assessment I received for efficacy was 80%, with 20% error. The highest was at 95%. That high precision renders numerology into a great scientific tool!

Learn as many methods as you can. Study Jung, Freud, Maslow, Erikson, and other personality psychologists. Study also the methods for examining abnormal psychology, so that you will have an advanced method of self-integration assessment. Nobody is perfect, each one of us has degrees of personal fragmentation that’s why we’re here in the physical plane. So please take pains to study the methods and even undergo psychological tests from time to time. This is for your own good.

The last thing expected of you is to declare that you’re perfect okay and other people are very defective. If you make this self-claim, please see a psychiatrist as you delude yourself with grandiose states. You may need to be locked up in an institution, the better for you. Amen.

[Writ 09 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]a