The Journey of Self-Discovery and Purification

To know yourself is a daunting enterprise. It’s been said that if you can accomplish this you will know your Lord. The reason for existence has been something that men have thought about for ages. Many have concluded that the reason for existence is to actually come to know the Lord of creation, our Lord, the one who created us. And we’ve been told that the path towards this knowing, towards this knowledge is to come to know who you are. The exact phrase is, “That to know your Lord you must know yourself.”

So, how does one come to know oneself? How does one come to know the answers to the question who am I? What’s the process that one must undertake on the path towards the understanding of who am I? Well, it’s evident that in order to begin to know ourselves we have to watch ourselves, we have to develop a witness within that comes to know us. For witnessing is a tricky business. One of the commandments is that thou shalt not bear false witness. So the question is are we capable of witnessing ourselves honestly. Are we capable of looking at ourselves in an objective nonprejudicial, nonfavoritism way in the way we would look at something else in the world? If there is nepotism in the world towards those close to us, how strong is that nepotism towards the way we see ourselves? How strong is that prejudice to make that which we do or that which we say or that which we think, how strong is that inclination within us to assume that that’s appropriate? Can we create a witness who watches our actions without judgment and is then able to report to ourselves as to what actually occurred? And then are we capable of creating an analytic mechanism within ourselves that can actually gauge or accurately gauge where we are, where we are going, how we approach things, how we do things? All of this is complex, subtle, complicated. But if we are going to get to know who we are, if we are going to get to know the reality of our existence, somewhere along the line we have to start being honest with ourselves as to who we are and the way we are.