Know Yourself...Be Yourself (with Clarity, Bravery and Kindness)

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Maya Angelou

When it comes to understanding what it is to be human, we all see through a glass darkly. Conscious clarity is different from the clarity of expression in words and ideas or the clarity of rational thought. The clarity of deeper human understanding is more like the clarity of water or to use an old Zen metaphor, enlightenment is wiping the dust from the mirror that prevents our recognition of reality. Clarity is the process of wiping away the dust from the mirror in which we can see and feel who we are as individual human beings in the context of our culture. Clarity seeks to expose your authentic self.

Human beings are so complex in their individual personalities and their social relationships that there seems to be almost an infinite number of possible expressions of behaviors across the spectrum of human nature. There seems to be literally no thought, no feeling, no behavior or belief that has not been a part of the human condition. Human beings seem capable of infinite variations in positive and negative responses. Humans hate and love. Humans destroy and create. Humans are wise and ignorant. Humans can discover deep and powerful truths as well as convince themselves of the most absurd ideas. The human mind and heart are capable of inflicting unspeakable horrors on the Earth and each other as well as unfathomable expressions of goodness, beauty and love.

For a human being to understand what it is to be human with anything approaching some clarity it is necessary to understand how such goodness and evil can coexist within the human condition. To understand what it is to be human requires a commitment to an unbiased truth that unites human knowledge in a way that goes deeper than any religion or philosophy. To understand what it is to be human means connecting all the different threads of human behavior into a tapestry that every individual might use as a representation of reality as rich as the representation of reality the brain creates from our senses.

The way nature and nurture, the left brain and right brain, genetic predispositions and culture are expressed in every unique individual is beyond definition but not beyond understanding as a process. Clarity is possible in the same way it is possible to understand a loom that creates infinite tapestries for countless different uses. Clarity is only imperfectly possible because no individual, no representation of reality can describe the truths of existence, just as your senses can only imperfectly represent the reality that exists outside your brain. Clarity seeks to unite the simple and the complex, the practical and the mystical, the mundane and the beautiful in every individual whether they are conscious or unconscious aspects of human nature. Clarity is knowing yourself in a way that allows you to be yourself in a more satisfying way.

Until very recently, the self was a concept left to writers and philosophers. Most people in most cultures couldn’t even begin to understand the difference between knowing yourself and being yourself. Better than any other writer, Shakespeare made that powerfully visible in his plays. Shakespeare’s genius was that he portrayed the tension between knowing yourself and being yourself in the context of the cultural and emotional lives of his many characters. Almost every one of Shakespeare’s plays is about that tension. He was the first person since the ancient Greeks to understand that reality.

The tension between knowing yourself and being yourself has only been studied with deep interest by scientists and ordinary people in the last hundred years and most of that research has happened in the last 50 years. The first self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie was written in 1948. Since then there have been countless books on the subject of the self, and this book is one more on the subject, but it proposes to investigate the tension between knowing yourself and being yourself in a systematic way that takes advantage of the recent genetic, psychological and neurological studies that have attempted to understand what it is to be a human being in all its cultural, intellectual and emotional complexity.

Knowing yourself and being yourself are fundamentally different because they are processed in the two opposite sides of the brain. The left side of the brain rationally analyzes and categorizes and understands abstract connections between concepts and empirical evidence. It has only been since the Western Enlightenment in the 18th century that the idea of an autonomous self with its own set of inalienable rights has existed. Before that, human beings defined themselves through the myths and stories created by their cultural groups. You were a creation of God, not your brain. Before the Enlightenment, the self was an unconscious reality in the right side of the brain where it always existed and where it still exists today. That indefinable, living, emotional being that lives in the context of its social relationships is not something that can be known, only experienced as a particular holistic feeling. The left brain knows the many different aspects of who you are. The right brain only knows the totality. The left brain sees and experiences all the changes you’ve known in your life. The right brain only knows the person that you have been, are and will always be. The left brain is primarily about things and thoughts; the right side of the brain is about life and feelings. This book is about how they depend on each other without knowing how that happens.

This book will try to unite what has been hidden in plain sight for millennia; the two distinct approaches to life and reality that have been identified time and again in different civilizations. We will try to describe how those two distinct approaches to life and reality reflect the two different hemispheres of the brain and the way they communicate to create one distinct representation of reality. We’ll try to use the left brain’s fine focused ability to break things into parts and use its skill with language to describe the different aspects of how your personal human identity exists. We’ll examine how your innate genetic predispositions and cultural socialization are expressed through the psychological and neurological aspects of your brain that creates the representation of reality that feels like your individual identity. We will try to describe the parts of you that create the indescribable whole that is so much greater than the sum of all those parts.

The point of this book is to allow you to look at yourself in the light of the latest research on human nature and personality. It will ask you to think about particular questions that you can answer without worrying about what someone will think. No one will be judging your thoughts. You can feel free to be honest with yourself, even if you have to face up to having certain behaviors, desires and predispositions that you might be reluctant to share with others. To get to some kind of clarity about who we are as individuals, it’s important to get past the problem of communicating our thoughts and feelings to another person knowing that we will be judged by different standards than our own, no matter how perceptive or how trusted that person might be. The questions we will ask are literally all about you, and so there is absolutely no right or wrong answer to any question. There is only getting a better sense of the person you really are.

This book will let you break down all the different aspects of what it is to be a human being with a deeper understanding of those things that are genetic predispositions for behavior that are difficult, but not impossible to change in their expression. It is also about those things in our personalities and characters that are the result of culture and our own socialization and personal experience.

We’ll try to focus to focus our attention on the different parts of human behavior that neurology and psychology have identified as aspects of human identity for one primary reason, to get familiar with the different aspects of what it is to be human in order to feel it in the deepest sense as part of our individual humanity. We are each individuals, but we are also a part of a species that shares many traits with other animals, and above these many common traits is our unique ability to understand how parts make a whole, how our individuality connects us to others in a way that gives life true purpose and fulfillment. The thing that makes us truly different as a species is how incredibly varied and complex our behavioral, intellectual and emotional responses are.

All the left brain knowledge and understanding collected here will help you know yourself in a better way from many different perspectives. Knowing that is important, but it is as always only a tool to help you see yourself in a more authentic way. All the different thoughts and ideas in this book are there as paths you can choose into the feeling that is your true self. It’s for that reason that the questions after each section are even more important than the knowledge contained in them because they’re meant to make you feel rather than think about who you are as an individual. The questions are important, but they are only examples of ones you may choose to ask yourself that are the most important questions of all. The most important thing you will ever do is learn to honor, respect and trust your own value as an individual. As Friedrich Goethe said so well, As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. As soon as you trust your value as an individual, you will be yourself in the most fulfilling way.

You’re Sooooo Complicated

Rainer Maria Rilke: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

Knowing yourself is like learning to drive a car. You have to learn how to operate it but you must also learn the rules of the road if you’re to drive safely. Every car is different so you also have to learn those differences before you can even set out. As infants, we already model those differences observing our caregivers as we learn about emotional actions and reactions as well as practical things like how to communicate in order to be understood. The most important of these operational tasks that we come to know is human language. By the time we are walking and talking we have already understood the right brain emotional context of our life as we sort out the things that result in the experiences of acceptance and rejection. Autistic children have difficulty perceiving and expressing these emotional cues and so have difficulty with social interactions. The left brain skills we need to communicate our personal needs and individual predispositions also depend on our ability to perceive and express who we are, the right brain feeling that goes beyond practical needs to our all-important emotional needs. Ultimately, the most important thing for a human being is learning the necessary communicative and social skills that allow us to be accepted by our caregivers and later by our peers and cultural group. Knowing yourself is learning to drive your particular model of car. Being yourself is learning the rules of the road necessary to take you where you want to go on roads that fit you and your life as an individual. Some people are like sports cars that feel best on wild twisting roads and some people are like touring sedans that want to go in comfort and style for long, straight distances. And every human being ultimately has the same destination; being part of a social group in which our individuality is seen, respected, honored and accepted.

If you are accepted by your social group most people have little motivation to know themselves better because the reason you learn to drive, your social acceptance, has been achieved. Most people, by the time they are 30, have learned how to navigate their social world, and so may change very little in their behavior for the rest of their lives. It is possible to learn to be a better driver and learn new social skills and more sophisticated ways of understanding your individual humanity, but usually it comes because our life has become emotionally challenging or unfulfilling. Knowing yourself sometimes begins with feeling that you are actually losing touch with who you really are. That can happen when you are more focused on creating your life and navigating the twists and turns in the road than living your life and its primary need for emotional connection. You may be functioning well in your social context but feel more and more isolated and alone. This is a common experience in modern life. In North America 25% of all adults will go for mental health therapy every year. This clearly indicates that there has become a fundamental disconnect between the ability to drive and finding a purpose in life that has meaning and fulfillment. It is when we are in some way unhappy with our lives that we are motivated to know ourselves better. And that is a very new and common phenomenon in our dominantly left brain oriented world where emotions come second to practical experiences and ambitions.

Who we are is impossible to define and so knowing ourselves is ultimately impossible to express in concrete terms. Unlike any other animal, we are so complicated that the best we can do is to identify the things about us that feel like they are permanent and unchanging, and the things about us that have changed over time. It is this feeling of a permanent and impermanent self that is the dialogue between left and right side the brain. It is as if we are constantly moving from one new room to another in the house that is our permanent indefinable identity. We only know the house by the rooms we occupy and have occupied, by the things we have left behind and the things we carry forward. Things and people and concerns that mattered deeply when we lived in other rooms may now seem distant and inconsequential. Things, people and concerns that matter deeply today may one day also seem distant and less important. There is no comprehensive sense of knowing ourselves from any particular time or set of circumstances. The context of our lives change inexorably over time, but the house we occupy, the identity that expresses our unique individual humanity is something that most people identify as unchanging and permanent. It is our confidence in that right brain centered self that is the foundation of who we are, and ultimately the foundation of the deepest relationships we have in life. Social bonds of love in which two people have the intuitive sense that they trust each other with their whole heart are the ones that are the foundation on which all the rooms we occupy in life will ultimately be built. It’s true for an infant. It’s true for an adult. We are the person that loves and is loved. The extent to which that is expressed is the greatest challenge and greatest satisfaction in life.

Our Left Brain World

We live in a left brain oriented world where our practical needs and Perhaps the most basic problem with knowing yourself and being yourself is that communicative skills occupy most of the day. The left brain focuses attention on things that are not living and most people spend the majority of their time and effort acquiring, using and maintaining things by using their practical and communicative skills. Even emotional connections like friendship may become a part of fine focused attention in which people are taking pictures of their dinner instead of experiencing the relationship they have with the person sharing the meal. Likes and dislikes have become quantified online to measure the extent of personal satisfaction in any particular experience. You can have a thousand or even a million friends and followers and feel deeply unhappy and alone. This is because we are so focused on knowing ourselves and expressing who we are that we have forgotten that real satisfaction comes from being yourself in the emotional context of the deep personal acceptance we call love. The biblical injunction is not to like one another, it is to love one another, and that right brain experience gets less and less time and attention in our complicated, technological world where we are constantly communicating our left brain fine focused attention on the particular aspects of our life as we try to know ourselves and express ourselves in a better way.

Anyone interested in understanding how deeply the left brain activities have taken over our world and left so many people so emotionally vulnerable and bereft should read, The Master and His Emissary by Dr. Iain McGilchrist who does an in-depth analysis of this left brain bias in modern life. He identifies The Master as the right brain where our personal identity and social relationships exist. He identifies The Emissary as the left brain which is tasked to accomplish particular things to serve the broader context of our personal identity and social needs. He argues that in our world, The Emissary, the left brain, has come to dominate our lives so much that we are losing touch with ourselves as it displaces The Master in its primary function of expressing our individual identity within the social context of our emotional relationships.

For those interested in a deeper understanding of the neurological basis for human behavior and identity and the way modern life has distorted the bilateral balance between the two sides of the brain to create a technological wonderland amid an ever-increasing emotional wasteland, I have found no better book than, The Master and His Emissary.

Think about how much time in the day do you spend focused on things, on things that need doing, on communicating practical issues, on your basic physical needs?

Think about how much time in the day do you spend with those people who know and love you?

Is it possible or even necessary to change that balance in order to feel closer to who you really are as a person?

More Complications

The first big complication in knowing yourself is that left brain reason both deceives and tells the truth. You can focus your attention on a particular aspect of your behavior and come to a greater understanding of how and why that exists. You can also rationalize your behavior. You can discover a deeper truth about yourself and you can also use reason to convince yourself of things that are actually impossible. Some people can do this to the point where they can even convince themselves that things that are patently evil like the murder of people in concentration camps either didn’t happen or in fact should have happened. It is ordinary people who have done the most extraordinary acts of brutality because we are so desperate to be accepted by our social group that we will believe anything we are told. If you just think of the stories religions tell about our origins, you can see how rational human beings can accept patently ridiculous ideas. Joseph Smith founded the Mormon religion, probably to justify his need for multiple wives, by creating a myth about an Angel giving him the book of Mormon written on gold leaves, a book that has mysteriously vanished. The most common theory for the origin of the