Know thyself
Don’t we all know who we are? The ancient Greeks thought it important enough to carve over the entrance of their holiest temple: the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where people came from all over Greece to ask the oracle about their fate. The words were: know thyself. For me, it wasn’t a question either — until I realized I couldn’t answer it. I could fill in a questionnaire with the facts of my life: which school I went to, how tall I am. But what makes up the thing I call me — that was a mystery. Who am I? What is my life? Am I living it right? Am I a good person? Am I brave? Honest? And when push comes to shove? Will I help? Will I betray? Who knows…
To answer these existential questions, I had to dig deeper and find the source, the roots, so to speak. And to separate the wheat from the chaff, I had to somehow take an objective point of view. Otherwise, I would just be fooling myself again. To apply the scientific method to self-discovery, I had to assess my own behavior in different situations. Staying objective about yourself is not easy when you are both the observer and the observed. To make things easier, I came up with the rule of life:
Do not lie, especially to yourself.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.
You are the easiest person to fool. Be brutally honest, and you’ll have a foothold.
Psychologist Bella DePaulo once asked people to log every lie they told for a week. Students averaged two a day, everyone else one — a lie in roughly every third to fifth conversation. And those are only the lies they noticed. Every lie you tell others passes through you first. You are the first one to hear it.
Over the following years, the Do Not Lie mantra revealed itself as the bedrock of existence. It acts as an antidote to a mental habit the Buddha called ‘clinging’: holding on to our personal interpretation of reality. From the day we are born, we unconsciously dissect and classify every experience we undergo. Our minds grasp onto viewpoints, beliefs, and opinions. We adhere to customary rituals to the extent of fixation. Our bodies seek sensory gratification, craving stimuli for all five senses. In addition, there’s an odd lens that distorts our perception of ourselves. The mind sticks to everything, wants more, and whispers in our ear. Strangely, it became obvious that I kept wanting and doing things I later regretted.
To combat this, I stopped lying completely. At first, it felt a little strange, but in a good way. I stopped doing things I couldn’t talk about later. This alone improved my life quite a bit. I stopped getting mixed up in shady stories. I stopped keeping track of what I’d told whom. I stopped being afraid of getting caught. And the story of my life began to straighten out. I stopped being afraid of being judged. I stopped being afraid of being myself. I stopped being afraid of being.
Stop doing stupid things. Stop lying. Stop making things worse.
Since then I’ve read numerous books on psychology, neurology, and how the brain works, digging for insights to fix and enrich life. Life held more potential than I could imagine with my little brain. Over the next few years, I went further in self-discovery than I had in my entire life before. I fixed myself.
The next turning point was the discovery of microdosing. Then the pace of events began to accelerate. A couple of years of contemplation and exploring Buddhism surpassed everything that came before. It turned out that Buddhist psychology dealt with the same experiences and understanding of life that I had. That reassured me I was on the right path. And I realized there was nothing more I could do for myself. So I started improving the lives of the people around me. And that improved my life even more.
You only need to find the thread and start pulling. Here are my ideas on how to live your own life. The things I wish somebody had explained to me. Something they forgot to teach at school and at home. Not many people know what they are doing, so they can’t tell you how to live. I couldn’t find a book that captured the essentials either. So, this is that book. This is what I wanted to hear when I was young. This is what I tell my kids. As it turns out, I had been holding it wrong. Life, that is.
Everybody can be a little bit happier right now, no matter how things are going. Catch the flow and tune your life for joy.
To start pulling yourself out, you need to ask the right questions. It’s a bit like Zen koans: paradoxical questions that often pass for jokes, yet let you feel that the world around you isn’t as solid as it seems. There’s an old question of that kind: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?” It sounded ridiculous to me. Of course it makes a sound, we can even record it. Then it clicked: the air only vibrates. The sound is born in whoever hears it. An observer.
The Buddha warned that you can’t save everyone, so let’s help those who can be helped. This is what led me to a better life. This is what worked. It takes a certain way of thinking, so I wrote down the insights and thoughts that help.
Let’s figure out how we work and what we can do about it. Let’s start with a simple question: