Self knowledge - key to Happiness

There are many ways to approach mastery over your life. All of them involve creating integrity in your mind, emotions, actions, and relationships. To accomplish this you will need to understand and have control over your core beliefs, and your expression of emotion. At first glance Self Mastery over your thoughts, beliefs, and your emotions might appear too challenging. To discover new truths about ourselves is to expand our self awareness. Think of self awareness as a circle. Everything within and without the circle is the self. What is within the circle is what your current level of self awareness allows you to consciously perceive.

Someone who is mindful may experience sensations inside and outside the body and mind more powerfully than others. The disconnect or a gap between your mind and your body is the first clue there’s something’s wrong. Try to understand that feeling in your gut or intuition. As for the decision, deconstruct your thought process. When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behaviour to our internal standards and values. We become objective evaluators of ourselves. Objectivity is a must for self awareness.

Self Awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self awareness is not limited by the mind or perception or points of reference as time and space. Self Awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment.

Self awareness is the means to identify your unconscious patterns and raise them in your consciousness so they can be changed. It is through self awareness that you identify and change the underlying core beliefs that drive destructive behaviors and create happiness. Self Awareness is largely a function of perception and observation. It cannot be learned like academic subjects that fill the mind with knowledge.

Self-Awareness Theory, states that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. We are our best judge. Through our self awareness and self interpretation, we can evaluate our potentials, our capabilities and our strengths and weaknesses. Self awareness makes us aware of our inner self, our true values, our strong areas of interest and potentials. We are more focused, as to what direction we choose and which area would have better prospects. Keeping this in mind we can take decisions in life, which could be more beneficial for our career prospects and can pursue our goals and ambitions successfully.

 Self Awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self Awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them. With practice we can learn to understand the thoughts and behaviour of people around us, and see new opportunities for interpretations in our thoughts, emotions, and conversations.

Awareness provides the presence of mind to see the assumptions and false beliefs before you invest in them. Recovering and developing personal will power allows you to keep your commitments with yourself and others. This is true whether the change is about addictions, emotional reactions, exercise, eating, or relationship habits. One way to recover personal will power is by identifying and changing core beliefs. You will have the choice and the personal power to express yourself with love and respect. By changing the way you express yourself, people will change the way they respond to you. Awareness is the presence. It is recognition of what is unfolding everywhere every moment. An open mind is the beginning of self discovery and growth. You connect with your inner self, realized and aware.

Awareness is the process of self discovery. It is to gain ownership of yourself, your reality. By doing so you become the master of both the inner and outer worlds. Self knowledge starts with understanding the source and overcoming these two emotions. Once this screen is penetrated, a completely new individual, who is unrecognizable from the current one, would emerge. And a new world would be born, where without greed and fear, there would automatically be peace, happiness, joy and harmony.

As you develop self awareness you are able to make changes in the thoughts and your mental clarity increases in your mind. Changing the interpretations in your mind allows you to change your emotions. Self awareness is one of the attributes of Emotional Intelligence and an important factor in achieving success. Self awareness is the first step in creating what you want and mastering yourself. Where you focus your attention, your emotions, reactions, personality and behaviour determine where you go in life.

We have been conditioned to focus on external factors and have missed the most important element in determining our happiness. Your mind is filled with assumptions, beliefs, and expectations of what will make you happy. These have been collected over years, both consciously, and unconsciously. They affect and even determine our choices in a way that we may not be aware. Hidden assumptions and false beliefs lead you down road to disappointment, frustration, and other emotional reactions.  Even the beliefs that you agreed to consciously in the past about what would make you happy might not be true anymore. The results of your efforts at becoming more self-aware build authenticity within you.

The beliefs in the mind of hope keeps us trapped in loops of emotional drama and dissatisfaction. Only by clearing your mind of false beliefs and assumptions can we see ourselves and other people more clearly. By freeing ourselves from the limiting paradigms of old beliefs we have a new opportunity to make better choices. The thoughts, choices and interpretations you make are determined by your core beliefs. When you change your core beliefs you change the interpretations you make, the thoughts you think, and the emotions you express. Emotional reactions usually stem from your assumptions about how life “ought to be” not from actual events. You create assumptions about people, relationships, business deals, and stocks you invest in. Your false assumptions (beliefs) become the set up to future emotional reactions.

We are normally driven by our conditioning, our beliefs, and our perceptions, our past experiences and our memories, all of which go to form the backbone of our existence on earth. To know ourselves, we need to know that humans are normally driven by two emotions in life: fear and greed. We either want something desperately or want to avoid something. We want a good job, a good spouse, a beautiful house, and lots of money, etc. We definitely don’t want disease, poverty, conflict, misery etc. These things we know instinctively, as they are a by-product of acting from either fear or greed. But if we were to overcome and let go of both these emotions for a moment—then what would we be like?

The first layer of ourselves that we need to penetrate is the layer that is filled with greed or fear. All our life, we live with these two constant companions. Every other negative emotion: anger, frustration, grief, jealousy etc, is only an offshoot of these two emotions. Since both are negative emotions, they obviously are likely to beget more negativity than positivity. It is easy to realize that once these two emotions are set aside, the behaviour of any human being would change dramatically. Since we have never done this, we don’t even know how that would feel.

Once these spectacles are off, we begin to see the world as it exists. More importantly, we begin to see ourselves for what we truly are, a spirit or soul encased in a body-mind complex, in total connection with other souls and with our source. We instinctively come to know about how the Universe is moving, how our Creator is working through us. We can sense, more than see, our purpose in life and can automatically align ourselves with this path and with our higher purpose. Competition, jealousy, violence, anger, frustration, depression and sorrow, all fall away, leaving back only the pure consciousness that we are, on an evolutionary path, with many other souls. The perspective we take on the happenings of the world and our lives largely determines for us the state of our world and our being. Thus probably the most vital lesson we can learn in life is the importance of what we think.

Introspection is the key to self improvement. Improving the self means self awareness taking us to the roads and perhaps heights of spirituality. Self examination is a must here. The more we have the ' I'm right you are wrong ' syndrome, the more do we suffer from self delusion. Introspection is the ability to see one's shortcomings and be able to see realities in a positive way of 'the other selves'. The 'other ' plays a very important role in introspection or self examination. It is the obverse side of reality, that if it happens is self knowledge and a learning process. The corner stone of education is to learn from others and to apply what we learn as virtues in life. If there is no practical application of a particular religion that we profess, then there is no learning. If knowledge is not self knowledge then there is no learning.

By self awareness, focused vision and contemplation, we can make decisions relating to business deals and important company decisions. We can choose and select from different choices, the best, according to our preference and our interest. Being aware we can create, explore and be adventurous.

Self awareness leads to self confidence by building on knowledge of who you are. You will be able to see other people’s unconscious behavior and so help them if you don’t become a victim. Self-awareness helps create an inventory of your unconscious behaviors and desires. Without an objective awareness of our unconscious desires or behavior we are powerless to alter them, even when they cause us pain again and again.

Happiness may depend upon the conditions of life, but it is itself an expression of consciousness. What, then, is usually attempted is to alter external circumstances (e.g., money) in such a way as to bring about a certain desired result, without, however, the consciousness, which is what produces happiness or unhappiness, really being affected. And here, naturally, the virtually insoluble problem arises of what is consciousness, given that this includes constituents of many kinds, of differing depth and intensity, many contradictions, and unknown areas. However, lack of absolute knowledge should not, in any circumstances, be an excuse for avoiding the necessary processes within the self.

Happiness is one of the pillars of Emotional Intelligence. It’s really about being aware of oneself and one’s emotions, reflexively acting in harmony with those around you. We understand ourselves and in turn respect and understand others, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to defend our needs. We act according to our feelings and our values.

To be happy, you don’t have to gather “things” or knowledge. The happiest people aren’t the ones who know or own the most, but rather the ones who have the most understanding and humility and who, in turn, know themselves best. If you don’t know your own limits, you’ll always try to surpass them. If you don’t know what you want, you’ll always be looking for something. If you don’t know how to appreciate what you have and who you are, you’ll always be frustrated. Self-awareness is a daily exercise that everyone should practice to better handle this complex world that presents us new challenges and tests us every day.