To be self-aware, you have to not only know of your strengths and weaknesses, but you must also acknowledge both. This applies especially to one's weaknesses. One cannot deal with his own weaknesses if he refuses to look at them. This is the particular part of self-awareness that most people struggle the most with. They do not like to see their own flaws.
One mistake commonly made is, when one finds out about their flaws, they will go out of their way to destroy them. They will stomp on their failings utterly. This tactic misses the point of self-awareness and can often lead to the production of new failings in the process. It must here be understood that the journey towards self-awareness comes with the understanding of why you are like you are.
Immaturity, and even prolonged immaturity, happens for a reason. Over time, some of those aspects can linger and become a part of who you are. You are not supposed to just wipe it out. You're only supposed to keep these negative aspects under control. People are made up of a lot of choices, interactions, and time. We're incredible amalgamations that are wonderfully complex. You have to accept everything about yourself without destroying it in the process, unless you want to lose touch with yourself all over again.
As an example, the more I look and listen to myself, I keep finding mistakes I have made in the past that have made me worse off then I was before. I struggle to keep those impulses under control and hammer in better habits and practices without ever dismissing either the positives or negatives that I have discovered. Self-awareness is, at its heart, a difficult balancing act.
The ultimate goal is so that the thoughts that you have are rife with sincerity. If you know yourself, then your own mind cannot work against you. People battle their minds for all of their lives. Most end up losing to it. There is a false notion that we shall always be the slaves of perception. But let me give you a bit of hope: If you can become only slightly self-aware, you will already see the world in a drastically different way. It starts with you though.
The conquering of one's self internally opens one up to the external. Your relationship to God and the universe shall be more clear. You'll be able to deal with things in a more sincere way and making decisions will be less trouble. The road is long and fraught with pitfalls, setbacks, and failures. It also never truly ends, but the rewards come often along the way. Because of this, I regret nothing.
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Introspection is FLOW. Awareness is BALANCE. If you look into yourself but refuse to see what you find, you have only FLOW. It is imbalanced by your insincerity, thus, becomes delusion. If you resign yourself to your nature without looking into it, without judging yourself, you have only BALANCE. Flesh and blood need FLOW to thrive, thus you wither from stagnation. As a person, you will implode upon your own emptiness. The key is flow AND balance, not merely one or the other. PERFECT flow and PERFECT balance are flow AND balance as ONE and the SAME. It is how Jesus, a mortal man, conquered death... and became EVERYTHING worth living for.
ReplyDeleteYou gotta balance yourself before you work on other things.
DeleteYou explained self-awareness so very well my friend. To make mistakes is human, but to learn from them is spiritual growth. There is a balance to becoming self-aware that can easily be knocked off-kilter by the chaos of the world if we let it. Introspection is the key when we silence the noise of the outside world.
ReplyDeleteMost people never fully make it because it hurts too much.
DeleteEvil is not a thing but a lack of something. We must use everything about ourselves to make things better. The first step is to be honest with oneself.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is the hardest step.
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