One of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't.
You also don't know the people you love very well.
You know, you can learn to kind of watch
yourself like you're watching a stranger, but you have to adopt a position...
It's a position of radical humility, I would say.
Humility in two senses.
So one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance.
So you have to understand that you don't know who you are.
And that's not easy to understand because you think you know.
But then, you know... You remember, you can't control yourself very well.
You're not very disciplined.
You're full of flaws.
Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think, but it's hard to get low enough
to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.
Now, there's an upside to that, too,
which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be.
And so the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror
of determining who you actually are.
Then I would say, well,
then you watch yourself and you attend to your conscience, and you see.
You watch yourself like you're watching a stranger.
You watch what you say and you listen.
And you think, what sort of person would say that?
And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner?
Is that making me feel stronger, weaker?
Is it filling me with shame?
Is it helping my confidence?
Am I laying out a lie?
Am I deceiving myself and other people?
Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse?
And it comes across as nothing but self centered narcissism?
What are my dark fantasies?
What are my aggressive fantasies?
What is it that I'm willing to do?
What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it?
What do I procrastinate about it? Why?
What am I unwilling to do?
What do I think is good?
What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing?
And what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement?
Those are all incredibly complicated
questions, and you don't know the answers to them.
So that's the start.
And then in terms of potential, you'll discover a little bit more about
your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts
of yourself, because then you discover your potential for mayhem.
There's some real utility in that.
The discovery that you're dangerous.
It's such a useful discovery.
It's actually something that strengthens you, because the first thing
that a realization like that can, in fact, produce is the ambition to incorporate
that danger into a higher order personality.
That dangerousness into a higher order personality.
And that can make you implacable.
That can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no.
That can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict.
That's unbelievably useful.
And so that's one of the potentials that you might discover.
The other thing you do to discover your potential is to...
Well, you challenge yourself.
Rule 4 in my book, 12 Rules for Life,
is compare yourself to who you were
yesterday and not to who someone else is today.
And that's kind of a good way to start this.
It's like, well, take a bit of a look at yourself and think
about what's not so good that you could improve, that you should improve by your
own standards, and that you would improve and set yourself a little goal.
Maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there.
You haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month, and you know that you
should be and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that.
It's like, maybe... I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month.
I'm quite a coward when it comes
to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper.
How about tomorrow? I just put that stack of paper in front
of me on my desk and I glanced through it for 15 seconds, see if I can do that.
It's like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement.
It's a humble goal because really,
are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after
a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper.
It could easily be. You've been avoiding it.
You're obviously afraid of it.
And so the situation could be that dismal
and dire, and you might think, well, Jeez, it's no bomb to my ego.
It's not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize myself.
Someone who could only withstand 15
seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of.
And so that's a form of humility, too.
It's like, there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are.
And there are small steps that you could
take that you might take that would put you in that direction.
And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps?
Are you capable of grappling with the fact
that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break
things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them?
And the answer to that is, yes, you are.
Most people have things they avoid and they're afraid of.
So I would say to some degree, it's the lot of everyone.
People vary in the degree to which they've conquered that.
And you do meet people from time to time
who are extraordinarily disciplined, but most of the time they've got
disciplined in exactly this manner through slow, incremental improvement.
And then you challenge yourself.
It's like, well, could I do this?
That would be better.
And you find out, and then you think, well, is there something slightly larger
and more challenging that I could do that would be better?
And you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out,
generally you get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges.
That's why I suggest that again in 12 Rules for Life and also in Maps
of Meaning is that you take responsibility for yourself.
That's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back.
It's like take on the world, man, but only at the level that you can manage.
When you're ignorant and biased and deeply
flawed and immature, that's where everyone starts.
You don't want to bite off more than you
can chew, but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with the part of reality,
some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory.
Then you attain victory over some small part of the chaos.
And then you're the person who's victorious over chaos.
You're just a beginner, but that's who you are.
And then maybe you can get unbelievably good at that.
And maybe you can ally to that
the ability to recast tyrannical order into chaos and restructure it
into something deeper, more profound, and more suitable for human habitation.
That's the other half of the hero myth, right?
Half is to overcome chaos itself,
and half is to confront tyranny where it needs to be confronted.
You do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you're able to function.
It's easier to understand if you think about a child that you're trying to rear
properly and you want to make that child, help that child reveal
their highest potential, whatever that is, whatever that means.
And what you do is you don't set them
a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their selfconfidence.
You form a relationship with them that is
predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being.
And then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability.
Right?
So they can do them, but they have to stretch.
The two elements of their ability would be
what they can do and how much they're capable of transforming what they can do.
And an optimal challenge stretches you to the end of what you can
do, and then into the domain of how you can transform.
And so if you love a child, then you set them tasks of that nature.
And maybe they have a reasonable chance of success.
A 70% chance of success or an 80% chance
of success might depend on how sensitive your child is.
You do the same thing for yourself,
but you have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim
pretty damn low, especially in those places where you're not functioning well.
And it might be so embarrassing that
you can't bring yourself to fathom that that's actually who you are.
Jung described the fool, the archetypal figure that the trickster
and the fool as the precursor to the savior to the Redeemer.
And that's unbelievable bit of wisdom,
because what Jung meant was that... To put yourself together,
which is to follow the path of redemption, to follow the Redeemer.
If the Redeemer is a type of personality that you could in fact be inhabited by or
manifest, then the first step towards that is to allow yourself to be a fool.
It's because you don't know what you're doing.
You have to admit that, and there's going to be a loss of ego or
destruction of ego, arrogant ego that necessarily accompanies that.
But you need the loss of that arrogant ego
because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward.
It's part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking.
It stops moral progress.
You're too proud of who you think you are
to notice what you're like so that you can change properly.
You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself.
It's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain
a positive, although very fragile, self image.
In the absence of genuine effort,
you know yourself by watching and paying attention.
That's why the Egyptians worship Horace, The Eye, as a God.
They knew that attention was important
and the Mesopotamians did the same thing with their God, Marduk.
It's not thinking, it's not imagination, it's just... It's watching,
like you're a snake, a snake a symbol of wisdom,
in part because a snake is a symbol of many things, but wisdom is one of them.
I suppose it's because encounters
with snakes, if they're not fatal, they make you wise,
because a snake watches like cold bloodedly.
There's no emotional reaction just to see what's there.
It doesn't allow, symbolically speaking,
doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed.
So you watch yourself like that.
As if you don't know who you are.
Well, that's the beginning.
And then you challenge yourself
continually to see how far past yesterday you could push today and tomorrow
and to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only
of your competence, but of your ability to increase that competence.
And it's not obvious to me... The upper limit
to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it.
The more that's guided by the highest of all possible visions, right?
The alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good.
And the more it's motivated by, the more it's accompanied by truth
in speech and action, the more you will develop your potential.
And I believe that potential to be as
unlimited in the upward direction, more unlimited in the upward direction
than it is unlimited in the direction that brings people to the political
and social health that so often characterize the world that we inhabit.
You also, I suppose,
have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it's a hell
of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility.
It takes a person out of the ordinary.
It takes them out of themselves.
There's an alienation and an isolation that goes along with that in us
and a great sorrow all of that together but there's deep meaning to be had in it
and there isn't anything better that you can do.