Know Yourself
While I wait for some inspiration about what to write next in the bLog I have been revisiting my book “I Connecting : The Soul’s Quest”. This book is the scaffolding for the work we each must do TO KNOW OURSELVES. While I haven’t mentioned the Bible in my book, the information in my book can be found everywhere in the Bible.
To know ourselves is not a psychological journey, that is only part of it. Knowing ourselves means that we can differentiate between the activities of our body, soul and spirit. Whenever we meet the words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ today they are not usually referring to what is really soul and spirit.
So let’s be clear about this. In the introduction of my book I put it this way:
What is our soul? What is our spirit?
So, if we have a soul, where is it and what does it do? And what is our spirit? To be able to truly understand ourselves we need to build a picture of the place of our soul and our spirit in our being.
Have you ever looked into a coffin to see the lifeless body lying there? It is then that we realise that the personality we knew is no longer present. We usually recognise the face and then we are hit by the fact that there is much more to this person than their physical body. Yet science, demanding scientific proof, continues to ignore this part of us that is obviously present while we live and leaves when we die.
In essence, our soul is an activity within us which is created by the way we feel, think, and act. Obviously when we die we stop feeling, thinking and acting and it is this activity that leaves the shell of our body at death. Apart from that, we must ask, “Who is feeling, thinking and acting?” The answer is I am. This “I” or ‘self’ is the name we call ourselves when we refer to ourselves. This is our human spirit.
Our “I”, this ‘self’, experiences life through our soul and our body. The “I” is the artist, the soul his work of art and the body is the canvas. Similarly, the “I” is the gardener, the garden is our soul and the soil is our body.
The question is: How do we connect these things up within ourselves? When we become more conscious of how we paint the canvas or tend to the garden, we have a new lease on life. The new consciousness wakes up our soul and we become aware of the guiding, directing, ‘all-seeing’ presence of the painter or gardener; our spirit which in this book we refer to as our “I”.
We all want to understand ourselves better, we all want to know how to get along with others more harmoniously, and we all want to have loving relationships. Knowledge of our soul and spirit holds the key to developing these aspects of our lives.
The rise in popularity of self-development systems is witness to the yearning within many people to understand their being more fully. Psychology (the study of the soul) being one of the most popular courses of study today testifies to this. Yet how many psychologists are aware of the specific activity of the soul? Furthermore, the rise of so-called mental disorders, especially in young children, and the increasing use of medication for these, points to an urgency to unravel some more of the mysteries of the human being. A suburban mother, when interviewed for a current affairs programme, described her ten year old son on medication for Attention Deficit Disorder as an empty shell with no soul. This speaks of a growing awareness in the population in general that we are more than just a body, just a shell.
My book is a guide to becoming increasingly aware of ourselves. It wakes us up to the knowledge of who we really are and gives us a taste of freedom like we have never known it before.
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