Self-Knowledge

Self-knowledge is one of the 13 great practices of the New Message. Through Self Knowledge, students of the New Message "cultivate a high degree of honesty and awareness about our states of mind and life condition. We seek always to know the content and state of our mind and the condition of our body so that we can be capable and ready to participate in the world."

"Self-Knowledge. This is knowing yourself physically, mentally, emotionally. How are you and why are you the way you are? Without this, we are literally caught up in the way we are. It drives us, it controls us and it leads to us acting and behaving in ways that configure a whole other life not of our making, made truly mindlessly and that can really trap and imprison us deep into our life. So the power of self-knowledge is knowing what’s going on inside so that you can choose what to follow—the strong part of us, the weak part of us, the wise part of us, the unwise part of us—and then go down that path in life. So self-knowledge is a whole process of coming home and understanding what’s going on within you."

“To know yourself is to know God’s Presence in your life, to know that God has placed a deeper Knowledge within you to guide and to protect you and to override your self-destructive tendencies and your selfish pursuits. To know yourself is to know what God has placed within you—not to understand it intellectually, but to know of its reality, to experience its presence and to follow its direction.”

The mind environment

"Beneath the surface of your mind is a deeper Mind, and a deeper current of life and wisdom. You will have to learn to still your mind to feel the power and presence of Knowledge within yourself, and God has provided the preparation for this."

"When you undertake a spiritual practice, you soon discover how chaotic your mind is and how your thoughts vary from one thing to another without any kind of consistency or purposeful direction. You come to recognize that there are certain patterns of thinking which lead to patterns of behavior and that this is part of your conditioning from being in the world. So, working with the mind is a great challenge. To be able to still the mind, focus the mind and direct the mind’s great resources is a tremendous challenge and one that requires preparation, practice and application."

"Over time as your stillness practice begins to develop, pathways and channels begin to form—well worn paths, so to speak—as a result of your stillness practice; and you’ll actually go deeper into more of the deeper mind environment which is very quiet. Along the way, you encounter fragments of memories, half formed thoughts, irresolutions. There are things lodged in the field of the mind, for sure. It’s a repository, you know? It’s interesting to visit those things. They’ll happen as just sort of like a flash experience or a transitory memory as you’re actually entering or exiting stillness. And that’s good I’ve found unto myself. It almost knocks them loose so that they can begin to float back to the surface and actually create an open space in the space that they occupied. So that’s the deeper mind."

The moment-by-moment Practice

Moment-by-moment, Self-knowledge is practiced by doing a personal assessment of our mental and physical condition. This momentary assessment can be done in nearly any circumstance or interaction.

Here we may note physical sensations such as fatigue, thirst or other signs of disregulated physical state. This may lead us to take action; to eat, drink, rest, conclude a conversation or adjust our plans for the day.

Mentally, we may assess the clarity of our thought, our level of acuity or the nature of our self-talk - something which pervades the background of our thinking.

The deeper Practice

Beyond its moment-to-moment application, Self-knowledge is practiced in a larger and deeper way through long-term mapping of our mind and its thoughts, states and condition.

People of the New Message recognize that the condition of our mind affects the expression of our outer life in all ways: our decisions, our utilization of time, our relationships, our financial and physical well being and our preparation for a higher purpose in life.

Therefore, we feel it is vital to undergo deeper inquiry into the makeup of our mind, how it has been shaped by culture and how it has been conditioned by past negative experiences.

In this deeper inquiry, we "map" three aspects of our mental condition: our tendencies of thought, states and condition.

As a first step, the student of the New Message can spend time each day reflecting on the condition of their mind, accounting for all the moments in which they practiced. Here, the momentary practice fuels the deeper inquiry and makes true self-knowledge possible.

Without the moment-by-moment practice, we may come to the end of a day with little sense for where our mind was over the hours. Likewise, without the deeper inquiry, we may not have the acuity or understanding to know what we're experiencing in a given moment. Each practice, momentary and long-term, makes the holistic development of self-knowledge possible.

Tendencies

Tendencies of the mind are the habitual thoughts and patterns of thoughts that we observe in our mind.

Like the bricks which make up the building, thoughts and their patterns are the functional building blocks which in turn construct the states and condition of our mind.

By mapping the tendencies of our mind, we may find predictable patterns at work day after day. We may also realize that these patterns are triggered or fueled by interactions or events in the world. This mapping work may lead us to a deeper inquiry into the triggers and irresolved issues of our life which consume our thinking and sap our energy. This leads into the practice of the deep evaluation which is a key aspect of preparing for the Great Waves of Change.

States

States are the product of our tendencies of thought which manifest on the timescale of days and weeks. States of mind may otherwise be described as moods, attitudes, ruts or emotional lows.

Mapping the mind

Mapping the mind can be done through a long-range commitment of study, perhaps 1 to 6 months, that utilizes daily or weekly reviews to build self-knowledge over time. This mapping can be done on paper through any form of outline or visual chart. The objective is to know the content of our mind, where it tends to go, and the life condition which these tendencies build and reinforce.

Life mapping

"Do a life map. It’s a practice we do in the New Message where you map out your life in its various stages to understand the direction, the arc, right, the trajectory that your life is on. And if there’s a lot of hard times and disturbing times, okay. But there are probably times of presence and confirmation where you really saw something, right, you saw something about your future. Mark those times; trace a line. And begin to take action.

If you have a sense that it’s, 'Okay, I need to go back to school or 'Okay, I need to address this relationship' or 'I’m not in the right place,' begin to take steps. Go look at schools. Talk to that person. Look at other places to live. Look at the best cities in America to live in. Even at the level of superficial, just begin to take action because you’ll feel confirmation, or you’ll feel the opposite, which is a contraction."

Metaphors

"The field of the mind, it’s like the ocean.... There’s the surface of the ocean and then there’s the deeper levels of the ocean.... Recently we’ve heard of the incredible benefits to the entire planet for the ocean to overturn itself, ... to actually engage the upper levels with the deeper levels of the ocean.... That’s just like what we’re doing with stillness meditation."

See also

The Great Practices

Therapy

Further study

• The Ship (December 28, 2013)

• The Threshold of Personal Revelation (July 21, 2009)

• What We Practice

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