What is Self-knowledge?

If you ask yourself who am I? You will get a quick response that will dictate to you your own mind. This probably has your name and surname as a title followed by a list of characteristics, occupation, tastes and desires that you think make you who you are and how you are. And this would be correct of course, but at the same time superficial.

Our mind is not capable of answering in its entirety such a vast and profound question as “Who am I?” Since it only has accumulated data of situations that have happened to us throughout life.

This, our life, is a succession of facts and circumstances of which we have no true certainty regarding its origin. They do not teach us the reason for our existence, the reason why we were created and brought into the world. Therefore, we are driven only on the surface of reality. We live our own succession of facts and circumstances from beginning to end. But is this really living?

Studying, working, having affectionate relationships, buying objects, taking trips … all that is very good, but what else? Have we been placed on the surface of a planet in an infinitely mysterious universe with the sole purpose of leading a prosperous social life?

Our material existence is necessary, but beyond it something else is sensed, like feeling a fragrance that the wind brings with delicacy or observing the incessant movement of the sea, something that has no name, something that we cannot describe with words, something that (captures) seizes and claims us, it calls to us, speaking to us in the deep nights while, (forgotten), we sleep in our beds.

That which is beyond, that “something else” is our own and true identity. Seeking to be consciously recognized (by us). It seeks to meet our attention and our will to be able to live, to be able to express ourselves and, finally, to be….

What is our real identity made of? Fragrances and hidden senses, beautiful splendours and enchanted landscapes, infinite firmament and delicate music, wood and leaves, bread and wine, charm and magic that all existing things have within their great mystery. What is our daily life made of? Probably of obligations, responsibilities, problems, stress, frustrated desires, excesses, distractions, transient pleasures and as we said before, endless, facts and circumstances that we carried out until the day of our death without major transcendence.

At this point, and to be able to begin to answer the question of; “Who am I?” It becomes necessary to have a type of knowledge that transcends that of our mind and that which we can obtain from any book. It is the knowledge of our own reality, of our own identity, deep and intimate in our hearts.

The knowledge of ourselves carries the prefix of “auto” because nobody can know us, (but) for us. It is a task, an adventure without equal to which each one rises and submerges, transcending its own barriers in the direction of the real and authentic that it shelters within itself.

The invitation that life offers us is that of being able to undertake that journey towards that which is “beyond” and which, like today, will never cease to call us.