Know Thyself, Forget Thyself, Become Thyself

Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”  The worlds “Know Thyself” where even carved above the door on the Oracle at Delphi.  So it is safe to say that lesson is literally carved in stone.  But the Zen masters tell us something different.  They say we need to forget ourselves.  “To know yourself is to forget yourself,” Dogen Zen-Ji tells us.  So which is it, to know yourself or to forget yourself.

There is value in knowing yourself.  To become whom you are capable of becoming, it helps to know your interest and abilities.  Success in life will be more effortless if you know what you have to offer.  It also helps to know which areas are not your strengths to avoid wasting your time on things better left to others.  

Knowing your values and what you want out of life will make it possible to define success in a meaningful way and ensure you don’t waste your life by misliving.  Only by recognizing your gifts, interest, values, likes, and dislikes can you become the best you can be and live the best life you can live.

 

 

Next, you need to forget yourself as your ideas about yourself can become a cage that limits you.  Forgetting your preconceived notions about yourself opens you up to more possibilities.  You are capable of more than you think. Forgetting yourself allows you to go beyond your self-imposed limits and find out what you can do.

The real trick is the thirds step to create yourself.  You will not do this through meditation, journaling, or other contemplation activity.  You are what you do, and you craft yourself through the actions that you take.  Want to be more confident, then start acting more confidently.  Try putting yourself in more challenging situations so you learn that you can handle them.  Want to be more generous, then act more generously.  In the end, you are not who you think you are; you are what you do.

 

 

• Learn about yourself.  Understand your preference, interest, talents, and values so that you can move more easily through life. But don’t let your ideas about yourself become a cage that limits and controls you.  

 

• Next, forget yourself.  Let go of your preconceived limits and your ideas about what others expect of you.  Open yourself to more possibilities.  

 

• Finally, act like the person you are capable of becoming.  Only through actions will you discover what you can become.  To do that, you will need to know yourself, your talents, and your values while simultaneously forgetting your preconceived ideas of who you are and your limits.

 

Knowing yourself is useful as a starting place, but it can also hold you back.  Forgetting yourself opens you to the opportunity to transcend your perceived limitations.  Taking action is how you ultimately discover who you are capable of becoming.  Ultimately, you are not who you think you are; you are what you do.

To study the way is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to awaken to all things.

— Zen Master Dogen

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