Know Thyself Completely
February 18, 2008 – 2:22 am
Inner Light
s28. “If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. Kindle light in the blessed country ever close at hand, and there hidden, let thy true self always dwell.”
Human nature to begin with is painfully incomplete, but this fact only dawns upon us slowly. Our schooling is to learn to develop our talents and find a place in the world but if we’re truly honest with ourselves we see that neither our training nor our accomplishments have brought us completeness. Left with no viable alternatives we doggedly chase after perfections even as our lives continue to crash down around our ears.
Completeness however, isn’t perfection. Completeness means bringing to light and integrating both what we know and currently don’t know about ourselves. Completeness means that all these qualities become accessible to us as living qualities which when integrated in us do nothing less than miraculously promote life. Perfection on the other hand has to do with feelings and concepts about what life should be like versus what it is. Perfection always falls short of reality because it fails to recognize life isn’t something that can be fully objectified.
Historically, the secret method in all true esoteric development has always been to overcome what is one-sided in ourselves not through perfecting the qualities we already have or desire, or by suppressing the qualities we consider to be bad or evil, but by awakening the qualities we already have hidden in us and which consequently are unknown to us. Once these experiences are illumined they supply the necessary completeness and naturally harmonize what we already consciously know. We see then that previously we only experienced half of reality at best, much like listening to the most beautiful music in the world but with only half the wavelength present. This is the deeper meaning of ‘Know thyself’ which goes far beyond any type of self-evaluation.
Lighting up or kindling the hidden and dark aspects of one’s fundamental nature means nothing less than seeing the hidden forces for what they are rather than what we fear them to be. We then discover that their disruptive energies are only disruptive because they’ve been put out of balance with the traits and attributes we’re already conscious of. We further discover on lighting up these hidden psychological forces that they’re completely normal forces that have only become diseased by being hidden and repressed; to use a mild example much like prolonged living underground causes a natural deficiency in vitamin D and an increasingly unhealthy pallor.
Consequently, when these previously hidden psychical forces are successfully integrated into the general life of a human being they become as healthy as any we can imagine. Only artificial isolation and fear make them unhealthy. Isolation and magnification serve to tear single features out of our being simultaneously bringing everything else into disharmony. But the process of lighting them up in consciousness reintegrates what’s been inaccessible to us.
This process of lighting up the hidden aspects of human nature through a kindling of consciousness and life takes a circular course around the human body and also within it. This kindling cycle in oriental training most typically starts with the breath since the breath is the primary means by which what is outside of us in the outer world rhythmically enters into us in our inner world. Using consciously activated but still rhythmical breathing one can activate the unavailable vital energies stored in the human body. If the process is successful what are released in consciousness are alchemical images or symbols of the forces stored there.
s39. “The circular movement thus has the moral significance of activating the light and dark forces of human nature, and together with them all psychological opposites of whatever kind they may be. It is nothing less than self-knowledge by means of self-brooding (Sanskrit tapas). As similar archetypal concepts of a perfect being is that of the Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes.”
Though it’s not mentioned in Jung’s text it should be mentioned here that this process doesn’t only occur by integrating polar opposites on the circle but also by successively activating adjacent parts of the circle. In my view this appears to be the hidden function behind all forms of circumambulation-primitive, cultural, religious, and spontaneous in that the body attempts to regulate and align what is otherwise impossible for the conscious mind to regulate and balance out.