The path of self-discovery
What do you think I should say when asked who I am?
Now, let's embark on our journey again. When asked who we are, is there really an answer other than “I am”? I can never really say anything other than this.
My first published book on amazon
This journey is where we seek to discover what "I am" means and is. Who is “I am”, and what does “I am” comprise? Knowing self is knowing the ‘I am”. To have known self is to have known and understood the “I am”. To know self is to know what is in saying “I am”.
The knowledge is not in the saying, it is in the defining of the “I am” A lot of things are, but of course “I am” is different from “what are”, that is why “I am different from what are”
The fact that no two things and persons are the same makes it very very necessary to discover self, know self, and understand self. At the level of “we are” is chaos and a zombie-like world. Uniqueness is the spice of life. Not all that exist is sun, neither are all that exist moon, or star, water, earth, beasts, birds, fish and so on. The option of choices and having to make choices makes living interesting.
What is self-discovery?
Self-discovery is a conscious and continuous process of knowing and understanding self. It is conscious because it involves knowing and understanding, which are conscious acts. It is an act achievable by only those who are present to their existence. It is continuous because it never ends.
For as long as man keeps taking in data from within and reacting to them, he continues to learn something new about self. It is also continuous in the very choices which shape and change man which we call development.
Let’s take a concrete example, when I am faced with a new experience that I have never faced before, I display a certain reaction towards that, which is me reacting to ina particular way. That particular way shows an attribute of me. It shows that I am that person who reacts in a particular way to a particular situation. That very reaction tells of the type of person I am and the response to that situation is a response flowing from my kind of person at that time. Being aware of this, is self-discovery.
Secondly, if it is something I feel is not a good personality trait, then I try to work on it and when I eventually succeed, it becomes my person to behave the opposite way when faced with the same situation. And so, we see that self-discovery is continuous.
Inadvertently, we reaslise how being conscious to one’s existence can be transformative and developmental. It is a journey. Happenings, experiences, reactions and actions are very key and vital among many other things in shaping a person and creating a personality. And the awareness of all these and changes also is the knowing and understanding of self. This knowledge can be broken down into different sections.
We would get to know this in the next Part.