Clarity From Self-Knowledge

Finding clarity within ourselves is the key to understanding the confusion and misery that exists in ourselves, and so in the world. Without clarity change and reform merely lead to more confusion. Clarity is the result of intense self-awareness and right thinking. Right thinking comes with self-knowledge. Without understanding yourself, what you think is not true. You and the world do not exists as separate with your own set of problems. You and the world are one; your problem is the world problem.

Inwardly we are all very much the same; we are driven by greed, fear, ambition and so on. Our beliefs, aspirations and hopes all have a common basis. We are one humanity, divided by the artificial boundaries of economics and politics. If you hurt another you are damaging yourself. You are the center of the whole, you cannot understand reality if you don’t understand yourself. To experience this unity you have to be open, you have to become aware of the division between knowledge and feeling.

Self-knowledge is extremely laborious and challenging. You must approach self-knowledge with an open mind and free of the presumptions of your conditioning. Right-thinking does not arise out of comparison yet in studying ourselves we are estimating and comparing. This is what prevents the understanding of ourselves. Our judgment comes from our desire to become something different, to conform, or to protect ourselves. This resistance prevents us from understanding.

You cannot understand the complex entity that you are if you are comparing it with where you were yesterday or where you should be tomorrow. Once you have perceived the uselessness of comparison there is a great freedom. When you are no longer striving to become something there is freedom to understand what you are.

If you do not compare and judge and you allow yourself to let go of your self-approximation you become liberated from duality; the problem and the conflict with the opposites fall away. Contained within this freedom from opposites is the answer to all of your confusion and conflicting problems.

To go beyond the problem of opposites we must go beyond the dualistic pattern of the I and the not I, the owner and the owned. This has to be realized though deep awareness of the dualistic hindrances.