2.6.a Phenomenon 3: Self-Knowledge – The Purification of the Mind
Self-knowledge is a natural outcome of meditation and silent prayer. As long as we pray from our thoughts and emotions, this process only happens to a limited extent.
Only when we enter into silence are we confronted with our true reality.
We begin to perceive the actual state of our mind.
Each of us has a certain self-image. But this is merely a construct - a mental idea of who we are.
Reality may be different and it is.
When we meditate regularly over a long period of time, we spend hours and days in contact with our true reality. In meditation, we cannot ignore or suppress anything, even if we don’t like what we see.
We are relentlessly confronted with everything that makes us who we are. The inner path to God leads through our own reality.
There is no way to bypass the restoration of our inner nature.
The path to God leads us through this process of self-knowledge.
What is prayer?
It is purification.
It is necessary to purify your mind. It is a method of discipline to cleanse our mind. It is necessary to unify your mind.
Through prayer, you will restore the standard of your original conscience.
Situations from our lives will arise in which we acted in certain ways. Often, a different image of ourselves appears in the process. In this way, we uncover layer by layer ever deeper self-awareness.
Recognizing our actual reality is the prerequisite for positive transformation. As long as we hold onto illusions about ourselves, no profound change will take place.
This kind of self-knowledge can initially be unpleasant. Christian mystics speak of “painful self-knowledge.”
But ultimately, it leads us to true freedom - because we begin to uncover our original nature or, in Buddhist terms, our true self. We begin to shed our fallen nature, just as a snake sheds its old skin.
In the end, we are gifted with the discovery of our true self.
Habits can last forever; it is so hard to change them. But they can still be changed while you live on earth...
When a snake sheds its skin, it crawls around until it finds a crack in a rock where its tail gets stuck. It will then coil its body around a tree and rub against it with all its might, even to the point of bleeding, to shed its skin.