To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
~ Socrates
I have a thick manila file full of personality tests from the last ten years. I can’t even remember half of the names but I surely have the Myers Briggs and The Strength Finder in there. I also own at least five books about the Enneagram along with many Brene Brown, and other self-help reads. Learning about oneself can be fun. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about myself and having “aha” moments through the Enneagram and listening to different podcasts. Yet learning about oneself can also be dreadful. It can be enjoyable in one moment and the next you feel exposed, naked to the world. Because these tests bring you face to face with your shadow self; The self that can easily be hidden, ignored, or in the case of religious experience, spiritually bypassed.
I am beginning an eight-week course to learn more about St. Teresa’s Interior Castle through the Center for Action and Contemplation. I started learning about the Interior Castle on my own a few months back and even wrote an essay about the first three mansions but then I got stuck. The more I read, the more I became confused and my reading slowed to a snail’s pace, and as an Enneagram 7, a snail’s pace doesn’t work so well for me. So this course is the perfect carrot to keep me motivated.
Know thy self.
In the introduction of this course, I was reminded how much I loved St. Teresa’s emphasis on self-knowledge. It came as a surprise to me at first, ignorantly believing that 16th-century mystics didn’t bother with that kind of stuff. They were busy praying the Psalms and floating away to deeper levels of consciousness but St. Teresa’s made it pretty clear that without self-knowledge, we can’t move deeper into prayer.
I'm not sure if I've explained this well. Self-knowledge is so important that I do not care how high you are raised up to the heavens, I never want you to cease cultivating it. As long as we are on this earth, there is nothing more essential than humility. Enter the room of self-knowledge first, instead of floating off to other places. This is the path traveling along a safe and level road, who needs wings to fly? Let's make the best possible use of our feet first and learn to know ourselves.
I thoroughly enjoy Teresa’s bluntness. She simply does not care how “spiritual” you may be, if you are not cultivating self-knowledge, then in one sense you haven’t learned to walk yet.
For those who’ve experienced religious communities, you have either witnessed or participated in spiritual bypassing, or “spiritualizing”. This basically allowed a person to skip over a difficult situation or conflict by cloaking it in God-language. It ignores the obvious lack of self-awareness, removing any opportunity for one to take personal responsibility, and rush to forgiveness and reconciliation. Because that’s what Christians do, right? And there are levels of this that exist in each community, from minor occurrences to toxic levels leading to religious abuse.
Growing up in the church, I was raised to believe in the “slippery slope” theory of sin. This theory was never about self-knowledge but had to do with behaviors like listening to my Nirvana CDs might lead me to a life of drugs. Now I see, that the greatest slippery slope in the church today, is our inability, and even refusal, to take a long hard look at ourselves.
…is the beginning of wisdom.
The purpose in a man's heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.
Proverbs 20:5
Self-knowledge is about gaining an understanding of ourselves. To gain such knowledge, one must develop and follow a curiosity that desires to find the roots that feed our way of being in the world. I’m not advocating that everyone learn the Enneagram or take the Core Value Index test, these are simply tools. But when I bump up against someone who simply refuses to even engage such tools, I have to wonder. Because gaining self-knowledge is actually more difficult than we think! I remember Brene Brown teaching that the average person can only name a few emotions: Happy, sad, pissed off. We need tools, books, community, and even therapy to help us even begin to scratch the surface of ourselves. We simply cannot do it alone.
When we do finally take the time to learn ourselves, something even more difficult must occur: change. Here, we have the opportunity to either choose the path of self or the path of wisdom. If you noticed that Teresa’ says that there is nothing more essential than humility. For Teresa, humility and self-knowledge are two sides of the same coin. She even goes further in saying that we shall practice much better virtue through God’s help than by being tied down to our own misery. (See what I’m saying about bluntness!) What I believe she is saying is that we can excel at practicing virtue if it is rooted in our humanity. This is the groundwork of prayer. This is where we learn to walk.
then thou shalt know the Universe and God
…first, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly
Matthew 7:5
Jesus isn’t being dramatic when he uses the analogy of a log in our eye versus the speck in another in Matthew 7. He is simply stating a fact about the difficulty in gaining self-knowledge. He is also cleverly showing us our hypocrisy in our lack of self-knowledge and our judgment of others. Socrates believed that in order to truly know others, we must know ourselves and to know ourselves is to also know the Divine who dwells in us. We often see the Matthew passage as a formula that enables us to be professional speck removers. We naively believe that if we “clean up” ourselves and practice the fruits of the spirit *Did anyone say Spiritual Bypassing?* we have been given permission by scripture to remove specks. But this passage isn’t about “helping” others, it is about personal responsibility and seeing ourselves clearly. It’s about humility.
Who looks outside, dreams.
I have said this before, our egos love to dwell in a fantasy world generated by our own unmet needs we are often unaware of. Then we become busy in protecting and nurturing the fantasy. For myself, I have stayed in unhealthy relationships and situations for longer than I should have because I had created a world in my mind that would eventually pan out. They didn’t. Instead, it took them crashing and burning to begin to understand my own fear and anxiety was the motivating factor for hanging on. I had clung to my dream of expectations more than I had the courage to see reality. And I would pray from this dream state. I would honestly ask God to bless my delusion!
who looks inside, awakes.
But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said:
“Wake up, sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise…
Ephesians 5:13-15
In the Wisdom Tradition1, it is said that you are “asleep” when one energy center has become dominant. These energy centers consist of your Moving Center, Emotional Center, and of course, the Thinking Center. For the Wisdom Tradition, knowing must move beyond the mind and embrace the whole of a person. The Moving Center is physical energy which is both your body and your outward senses of the physical world. The Emotional Center is not what we think it is in Wisdom Tradition. It is not personal affections, feelings, or what we would call our passion or soul. The Emotion Center or heart, is an organ of perception acting as a sort of antenna that orients us toward the Divine. The Thinking Center needs a bit less explanation and is often our most dominant center of the three, lulling our other two centers to sleep.
Prayer illuminates, waking up all three centers and bringing them into balance and yet, we often are taught prayer as a thinking practice. We close our eyes or open our journals and offer prayers of thanksgiving, petition, supplication, and confession, in other words thinking, thinking, and some more thinking. This is a true misconception of prayer and is often our biggest obstacle in prayer. In the same way, self-knowledge is not just an intellectual exercise, it must be balanced between all three centers. How? Through balanced knowledge-seeking. Don’t just learn about the Enneagram, go for a mindful walk in your neighborhood. Don’t just listen to podcasts, practice being present to your heart, perceiving the Divine in the world around you. Learn but then also listen. Practice mindful movements and listen to what your body is saying. Self-knowledge is intellectual as much as it is perceptive and embodied.
I don’t think St. Teresa used “feet” as a metaphor for self-knowledge flippantly, I believe she was making a point. It’s easy to get caught up in our minds as it is tempting to over-spiritualize any given situation. Instead, a balanced knowing grounds us in our humanity while the act of prayer sharpens our perception of the Divine. The legs of self-knowledge bring the needed balance to a heady culture. Teresa even describes self-knowledge as a safe road to walk upon in prayer, there is no need for wings to fly off to deeper levels of consciousness. Just walk the road of balanced knowing, letting the light of Christ illuminate the path.
Remember that Christ sees and loves you as you; may you also have the courage to see and love you as you, and find your feet to keep walking the path of prayer as your mysterious, most beautiful human self.
Much love,
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For work I recently did the "Everything DiSC Agile EQ" assessment and found it very fascinating. It stays away from that false idea of immutability many "personality" tests take, and is clear that this is where you are in this moment and that there are things you can strengthen (or strengths you can lean into) based on your results. Take it in a year, and perhaps you'll have shifted! But what was most interesting about it was learning how to flex my own communication styles to better relate to others and meet them at their level. So the personal level was in-depth and awesome, but the EQ and relating to others aspect of it I found was incredibly vital and so overlooked by other tests I've taken.
On a separate note, I'm listening to the book "The Once and Future Sex," by Eleanor Janega and think you would really find it interesting. They just talked about Bèguines and some of the women who chose to live religious life but still connected to their communities - and some of them wrote too! Marguerite Porete is a name I wrote down, she wrote something called "The Mirror of Simple Souls" - curious if you've ever heard of her or the Beguines in general?