One of the inherent frustrations among Westerns in modernity
is the quest to discover one’s purpose, sustainable contentment, and further making
a livelihood out of meaningful work. Daily we are subject to an overwhelming
barrage of scripts that promise to make us safe and happy yet fail to do so. Hence the notion of happiness is generally
connected to moments in a day that must be maintained by rising above boredom
or repressing chronic, internal anxieties or stress that would quickly exhaust
the average person if it were not for material consumption, the technologies
created to “save time” and the need to be always doing something.
Carl Jung said that with all this resistance and
distraction, consciousness is still pressing forward "to its own inertia,
but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed
for further expansion have been sapped." Hence there is a disunity with
oneself that breeds discontent. A critical atmosphere thus must develop—the
necessary prelude to conscious realization. This is a quiet call from within to
listen, to pay attention to the hidden, to possess the secret imprisoned in
inescapable egotism yet gradually to be revealed by way of discovery, a natural
progression within all of us that often goes unnoticed or unheard until it is
late in life. It is the inner voice that begs your reflection now and over time
and promises wholeness, completeness, human flourishing.
While I have been on this path for many years, I recently
came across an exercise in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator that essentially was
written to provide an a starting point to youth or any searching individual who
is willing to chase a set of probing questions over time as a method to assist in
the cardinal yet byzantine task of knowing oneself. Nietzsche begins, and I
recommend as a threshold this project.
How can one know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business:
if a hare has seven skins, a individual may skin himself seventy times seven
times without being able to say, "Now that is truly you; that is no longer
your outside." It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig
into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one's
being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can
heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears
witness to our being – our friendships and animosities, our glances and
handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens.
For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young
soul survey its own life with a view of the following question:
Here is Nietzsche’s method laid out in the form of
questions. I suggest take several weeks to do this. Lay out your musings on
paper or document; keep coming back to it and lay it out, expand it as
described below. The numbering is mine
for which I recommend following before moving to the next phase. I have
provided some alternative translations in the brackets.
[1] "What have you up to now truly loved, [2] what has
drawn your soul upward, [3] mastered [dominated] it and blessed [uplifted] it
too [at the same time]?" [4] Set up these things that you have honored [revered
objects] before you, and, maybe, they will show you, in their being and their
order, a law which is the fundamental law of your own self. [5] Compare these
objects, consider how one completes and broadens and transcends and explains
another, [6] how they form a ladder on which you have all the time been
climbing to your [true] self: for your true being lies not deeply hidden in
you, but an infinite height above you, or at least above that which you do
commonly take to be yourself.
Finally Nietzsche exhorts, “There may be other methods for
finding oneself, for waking up to oneself out of the anesthesia in which we are
commonly enshrouded as if in a gloomy cloud — but I know of none better than
that of reflecting upon one’s educators and cultivators.” Here (the method
above) Nietzsche gives us a place to start—consider those who have informed use
over time, the various people and actions of others that have influenced us and
have in part breathed life into us or imparted to us a model of what we
intrinsically view as genuine and worthy of holding on to which may well inform
us about the person we are and wish to be.
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