Know Thyself

*To choose the life you live, one must first live to be who they are. This is about you being the person that your spirit has been waiting for you to manifest in reality. The reality, is not the one you think, but the one you live. The person you are, is not the one represented in the hearts & minds of others, but rather, the living, breathing manifestation of every action you undertake.*

With the words that follow, I seek to introduce you to yourself. Understand that this is a process. I cannot tell you how long it will take or what you will find along the way. But I can tell you that when you are ready, you will be given the key to every door of every mansion that resides within you. And once that happens, well… I’ll let you see for yourself who you truly are and where you come from.

Now, understand this: All this time, you’ve been holding yourself up. This life, your life–the one that feels so predictably boring and uninspired–that’s ALL you. If you are currently going through this, do not despair. This is far from a bad thing. When you feel that push, pull, and tug, from within, the kernel of who you really are is trying to get in touch with you. And if you do as I did, and ignore this, well… discomfort begins to set in, and gangrene itself around the recesses of your mind, leading to an endless array of sleepless nights and drawn out days.

You don’t know where you’re going until you know who you are.

This is one of the single most important rules I can tell you. Verily do I desire that I had put this riddle together for my own life a decade or two ago. I’ve seen that for me, most of my finding out about who I am, was all done behind the scenes, living and fighting through those daily mental battles no one else even knew about. In this regard, win or lose, we are all born fighters, from our inception.

The problems of the outside pale in comparison to the arrows that fly at you from within.

Challenges come at you from all slices of the day, whether during the brilliance of sunshine or the opaqueness of night. What you want is to be prepared to excel in all conditions, regardless of the hour at hand. When you Know Thyself, you are able to stop defending yourself from yourself, and thereby fully concentrate on what it is you truly seek to achieve. You can pursue or even realize your goals all day long–if you don’t know yourself, you will always operate within a limited capacity, because many of your most potent resources will be spent overcoming the “rolling roadblocks” that you, yourself, construct.

When you align yourself with the higher power that is imbued inside of you, all the experiences you have endured begin to automatically piece themselves together and take shape. We all have deficiencies. Each of us has a set of weaknesses or internal setbacks that always tend to reveal themselves in those moments where we desire them the least. As you endure the trials and tribulations, it is less about getting through it, than it is about growing through it.

You will never be completed.

If you feel unfinished–if you feel incomplete, well… GOOD! Your rise is never done. Your journey never ends. Once you confront the reality that you reside from a place that has been around since the day before forever, you know your growth goes on forever. Every day that you are here, you grow into someone better than they were the previous minute or hour, because there is always new work to be done. Even when you think you are finished with your work, look around–you’ll always find more work to be completed.

You see, when you believe you are finished with you work, you die. If not literally, figuratively. So if you look at life through the lens of always having more work to do, you are living. When you Know Thyself, your capacity to do good works will flow with the veracity of the rivers of blood that circulate throughout your body. Day and night, powers abound in your presence with the celestially inspired desire to see to it that you have everything you need to live because you are here to do a job–we all are.

You go through things to get things.

Suffering is not intended for your surrender. It is intended for your internal rise. All the good in your life begins from the inside. All the battles in your life begin in the mind. Your successes and your battles that you go through may manifest themselves out in the world for you to tangibly see and witness, but they originate in your mind. It is what you see and what you tell yourself internally, that sets the tone for every course of action you proceed to take thereafter.

So what you must do is get in the habit of constantly building yourself up. If you are the type to talk down to yourself and give birth to negative thinking which leads to faulty decision making, you must cease that brainwashing immediately, because that’s precisely what it is. We tell ourselves lies day and night devaluing ourselves and defiling our true powers with falsehoods. Then, we wonder why our lives aren’t as good as they could or should be.

If you are in the habit of talking down to yourself, you know not who you are.

When you dwell in your secret place, hidden inside of you in plain sight, and engage in the habit of devaluing yourself with lies that belittle you, your power and your energy is always in direct conflict with the director of that power & energy–YOU. Every moment that you live in this life, you exercise power. It is within your purview that you have full control over how you exercise your power. You can literally build up, or tear down. The choice is yours, even if you are unaware of that. Every breath you take, you have the ability to shape this world how ever you see fit. You can make it better or worse. And like everything you do, it first, originates in your mind. This is why it is so important for you to Know Thyself.

We spend our entire lives figuring ourselves out. You ever look, not at, but in, the mirror? Who are you? Are you not tired of feeling lost? Are you not tired of being in this self-engaged denial of your abilities thereby devaluing your own self-worth?

One cannot be great unless they are born great. All of us are born great, no matter the circumstances that make up our immediate surroundings, because we all come from the greatest of them all. The greatest of them all did not set out to make you average. The greatest of them all did not set out for you to have limits. The greatest of them all did not set out for you to wallow in misery, confusion, and doubt. The greatest of them all did not set out for you to be perpetually lost in the world, not knowing who you are. The greatest of them all did not spend all the time, energy, and resources required for your existence in order for you to spend your entire existence denying yourself and your abilities.

When you deny your gifts, you not only deprive yourself and the world–you deny your creator.

Your place in the world will always elude you if you do not know who you are. If you do not know who you are, why would you expect someone else to figure it out for you? When you are lost, you do not know what to do or how to fix it. This, is a program inside of your mind that you must break through–when you are on the outside looking in, that glass wall needs to be shattered. As you might have guessed, you are the only one that can do that.

Think of this paper as a brief introduction to yourself. Knowing Thyself is a subject that cannot properly be broached with just one post. It took me 35 years for me to come to terms with who I am. Much of that time was spent growing into the responsibility associated with knowing who you are and then taking that gift and extrapolating countless abilities from that bounty thereof. When you read these words, you are walking with me. And with every walk we take, you and I, we each grow, a little bit better, with every word read, and every step taken. I thank you for receiving this message and I hope you come back for more in the future.

Before I leave you today, I want to write a few final thoughts for you as follows:

• Your actions not only have consequences. Your actions speak truth to the kernel of who you truly are.
• The hand that gives is always above the hand that takes.
• Your ideal job in life is to do the job you’d do if you didn’t need the money.
• It is what you make out of what you have, not what you are freely given, that separates you from those around you.
• Learn accordingly. Squeeze experience out of every second you live; in tough times, the minutes can seem like years but the years go by like minutes.
• Find consolation in being true to yourself (Know Thyself) even if no one else lauds your efforts.
• Monitor your thoughts closely–sometimes it’s harder to cope with the disasters and tragedies you imagine than with reality itself.
• Your natural gift is a flame that can be hidden, but never extinguished.
• Your seeking is the reason for your finding. Know Thyself, and you will know God and the Universe.

–Daniel Cousin

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