Description
A Search for Self – By Pinchas Winston
THERE IS A lot of knowledge out there, but little of it gives us as much pleasure as the kind that helps us better understand ourselves. Life is filled with many strangers, including people we pass in the street, most of whom we NEVER get to know or understand. We barely get to do that with people we associate with on a regular basis. But why live with someone we CAN know and understand but don’t?
SELF-knowledge is where it’s at. The more you know about yourself, who you are and what you are capable of being like, the less surprised you will be when you find out more. It’s better to make a friend out of the stranger inside you than to find out that the companion inside you is really a stranger. Some people never quite recover from THAT.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so necessary if the world were just far more mundane. Then life would be the same every single day, and it would have no surprises. You could be sure that what you see today will be the same thing you will see every day henceforth, and that the people you know will always be the same. Then YOU could always be the same as well.
As hard as some people have tried to make their life work out that way, they were not successful. Life is just not like that. The WORLD is not like that. The world is infinitely diverse. It changes people in ways they could never predict. And if we do not get with THAT program, then we’re going to have a VERY difficult time fitting in, being “normal,” and achieving happiness.
Psychiatry is a VERY busy field, and the pharmaceutical industry makes BIG bucks. Self-help books take a huge chunk of the book market. In most cases people buy these books AFTER the problem has occurred, after the “stranger within” has made a surprise appearance. Then often with much anguish, and by using up very valuable resources, they become acquainted with other parts of their personality.
Today it’s even harder to know oneself than ever before. Modern man, in his wisdom, thought that by ridding himself of religion, he was in fact increasing his freedom. Surprise, surprise: he has never been more enslaved.
Once upon a time, people grew up with the belief that there were certain facets to their personality, and not all of them were good. They believed in things like demons and angels, beings that today we look at only as creations of religious imagination. And they believed in the evil inclination, a.k.a. the yetzer hara, which began as a snake in Paradise, but which was absorbed after THE sin into the inner being of everyone.
Granted, the early understanding of this negative dynamic of being human was often unsophisticated and even abused, especially by religious leaders. But when their “other” side appeared, they could make something of it, and often fight it against it. True, it was often complicated and made life difficult, but who says that is necessarily a BAD thing?
The modern world does. It knows that pain is an intrinsic part of life, and that struggle is usually part and parcel of success. But it also believes that it should be possible to control when and where struggle and pain should occur, and it spends a lot of time and energy on this. As far as the modern world is concerned, we’re here to enjoy ourselves, and that means minimizing the struggles in life.
Therefore bye, bye yetzer hara. It’s just extra intellectual baggage, unnecessarily making people feel bad for things they think, say, or do. Humans have problems. They don’t have perfect childhoods. Life can be confusing and tough. The human mind is very complex. The art of life is trying to live within the communally accepted framework, minimizing the damage you do to yourself and to others. Society doesn’t ask you to be great, just not to be too “bad.”
So how’s that working out for society?
It depends on where you’re standing. If you’re in the thick of it, you can be so swept up in the momentum that you can’t even see how crazy the world has become, and how much you have become a part of the insanity. All the evil reported in the newspapers is treated like “another day at the office.” Tragedy.
If we take a few steps back, we will notice that something is not right, and perhaps, from time to time, even complain about the way things are. But that’s about as far as we go, other than perhaps turning off the news early because we can’t stand to listen to what is going on in the world of which we are still very much a part.
However, those who step back far enough, far enough to see the world more as God does, clearly know that something is VERY wrong. There are still a lot of “good” people in the world today, but overall the world seems to have lost its way. Today still becomes tomorrow, and on into decades and centuries. But as the world nears the end of its SIXTH millennium, where is it really heading? How much does mankind understand itself?
A philosopher once stated, “I think, therefore I am.” Many people believe that just because they THINK, they ARE. Are WHAT? The best they are MEANT to be? As happy as they CAN be? As moral as they SHOULD be? There is a spiritual passageway between two very different levels of living which belong to each and every one of us. We only need to “think” to access the first level. We need SELF-KNOWLEDGE to access the second one. It is the key.
There IS a lot of knowledge out there. But so much is only a distraction away from the knowledge that counts the most: knowledge of self.
