Saturday 30 April 2016

Discover Yourself.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom" Aristotle once said, although, that statement can best be rivaled by the famous quote from the Holy Bible, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom..." Now, while philosophers and Bible scholars will have a field day in proving which quote holds more accurate, I can't help but come to think and accept that there is wisdom in knowing oneself, whether it is the beginning or the middle or the tail of the wisdom's ladder. No wonder one of the greatest philosophers to grace this brown earth famously said, "Know Thyself".
Perhaps, this has been man's greatest challenge, the ability to figure out who and what exactly he is. Little wonder Lewis Carroll, after much pondering, said in the famous Alice in Wonderland, "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's a great puzzle”, and it seems this puzzle won't be solved anytime soon.


May I ask? Is there any reward for knowing who we are, what we are and meant to be? Is there any satisfaction or gratification we will be fulfilling if we finally discover who we are? Or is it just for the thrill of it?
Well, I believe Ralph Ellison did already answered in his Invincible Man, "When I discover who I am, I will be free",
Now, if Ralph is considered accurate, then we can attest that a man can never be truly free until he knows himself.
What a life! To be imprisoned by self ignorance amidst a world of endless possibilities. No wonder man struggles to create a life he wants even when everything is given to him. To sit by the river banks, and still washing our hands with spittle is the restricted freedom man operates with, and 98% of the world's population still remain in oblivion. No wonder we have little number of people who actually move this world. In fact how can we move this world if we can't move ourselves? No wonder Socrates famously said, "To move this world, man must first move himself”. Until you move yourself, you can't affect this world. Until you conquer yourself, you can't control this world, because you act based on what you know.
Discover Yourself. You owe yourself that. It is not going to be easy, nobody said it was, but fate salutes the man who by courage ventures on a journey into himself. This is the one true journey.
So, this is me saying, A man will only act or behave based on what he knows about himself".
So I ask, "What do you know about you?"

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