Threshold diary: Study yourself

Welcoming new students to a prestigious university, I listened to a professor’s opening remarks.

We may teach you many things about the world. But what we can not teach you are things about you. We can provide theoretical topics for you to study, but the topic of studying your real self is a curriculum that is entirely up to you. We might provide you with many opportunities for that, but the scrutiny with which you look at yourself and study yourself, is yours.
It is your choice to take time and reflect on your actions. You have to allow yourself to discover the patterns and habits that dictate the repetitiveness of your life. Notice when repeated behaviour repeatedly brings undesired results. Observe how you explain that to yourself. Is there hate? Is there anger? Is there disappointment?
Are others always at fault? Do you obsessively blame yourself? Or are you never at fault? Do you choose to believe that you can’t change, or do you choose to see that believing you can’t change is stopping you from doing so? Is it the responsibility of the world to change your life and your behaviour?

Ironic how the entitlement that comes with egoic pride is bound to a blindness to the very thing it is meant to hide. It may not only fool those it is performed for, it might be such a convincing routine that even the performer may believe it. Are you puffing up to gather strength for what you are actually about to do, or to hide weaknesses and insecurities? Playing it cool only works on those who don’t see that it’s a show. But brutal honesty about who we really are requires bravery. Being honest with ourselves can already be a tough challenge. There are the parts the ego wants to hide from itself. Since it perceives itself to be the one to keep the show going, it has to think that the show is it. It identifies with the role it performs to not see what it is meant to hide.
Those are the areas we learned to look away from. We had to find ways to get our needs met, and if no other way could be found, preservation of the projected self as the anchor of security would have the highest priority above all other concerns. At any point in our lives, we may develop certain patterns to keep that anchor where it is, and those patterns can get rooted so deeply in our behaviour that we might become fully unaware of the masks we put on. We may only notice what the characters we play will cause.

When you hurt other people, it’s probably because of the behaviour you adopted after getting hurt yourself. Acknowledge your pain, your sadness, your disappointment, your shame, your anger, your hate, your apathy, your grief, your fear. If you allow them to live unacknowledged in the shadow of your subconscious, they’ll stay there and maintain the habits that maintain them.

Will you choose to look at what those feelings are like, or do you choose to look away when they creep up on you? Is there a voice denying their existence? Is it calm certainty, or might that be an act? Were you taught to hide certain parts of yourself, or did you teach it to yourself, to not let others see? Have you forgotten the you that you’ve hidden within you?
It’s all yours. You are the only one to uncover and reveal it. To yourself and others. Nobody else can do that for you. They can only be mirrors of your light. Shining it is your job.
Study your own light, and in time you may find bright spots you forgot were there all along.