Real Wisdom
Today it is about a quote from the Greek philosopher Aristoteles: “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
This is an interesting quote on many levels. It makes sense that ‘knowing yourself’ should be one of the most important things, because we are always with ourselves. It is probably more important than knowing many other things that happen outside ourselves, however our life is normally mainly focused on other things; study, job, partner, sports etc.. Those things of course can also be important, but if we want to be happy then yourself logically should play a big role in that. If I don’t know myself then how can I make myself happy? It is difficult to make someone happy that we don’t know.
From a young age we learn about many things, but there is no class that really help us to understand ourselves. And even if we learn about ourselves, it is almost always about our bodily characteristics; skin color, gender, how the bodily functions etc..
During meditation we are the observer. We observe our thoughts and we observe our body. By observing we take distance from them; there is always some distance between the observer and the thing or person being observed.
Maybe it looks like we don’t do much while we meditate, but that is just from the outside. By raising our awareness and improving to observe and control or thoughts, we actually learn a lot. Not about regular things that we normally learn about, but we learn about ourselves.