Get More Self Knowledge: Our Primitive Mind

• People with self-knowledge are less prone to blame their problem on others.
• They admit to the full extent of responsibility when things go wrong.
• They are less frustrated at work, even though they don’t have the perfect jo...

• Set aside 20 minutes on a daily basis and sit with a paper and pencil, asking yourself simple questions like: What am I regretful, anxious or excited about in the present moment?
• Write down what comes to your mind immediately without censoring or thinking. Do it as unselfc...

Without self-knowledge, we have hunches on what makes us happy: We wrongly calculate what our purchases, or impulse buys would make us feel. We travel to a certain place and feel disappointed. We buy the latest dress, hoping to look good, but are only surrendering to consumerism....

We can get to know ourselves by conversing with others, but not how we think a conversation should be. The key to a great conversation is asking the right questions and then listening well.

Some examples: Think about what flaws of yours you want to be treated in a bet...

1. Confrontation styles: We are having four kinds of styles when we confront others: passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, or assertive. Our behaviour depends on the situation we are in.
2. Criticism: We respond to criticism in a variety of w...

1. How We Feel About Our Family: We all have complicated feelings towards our family members, and may have unconscious attitudes and biases that can play havoc. It can be guilt, envy or disloyalty.
2. Blame And Self-knowledge: We blame our parents for th...

Self-knowledge makes us understand how we impact others, allowing us to adjust ourselves, being more interested in the other person rather than just ourselves.

Strangers are surprisingly good at guessing stuff about us, though we find it difficult to grasp. We don’t realiz...

1. Vague Ambitions: We talk of helping others, or being creative, or changing the world. Admirable they may be, but the ambitions are vague because we don’t know ourselves.
2. Attitudes To Ambition: Most of us suffer from a problematic attitude towards s...

1. Developing a capacity to observe our basic instincts: The times when our minds are free from subjectivity, defensiveness and self-justification(like late at night when it is quiet), we get a glimpse of truth, a tiny moment of wisdom or insight about how we behave.
2. ...

Many of our mental processes, mood swings and irrational behaviour can be explained by simple facts like not being hydrated, not being fully rested, being stressed, or being hungry. These physiological reasons can be the real culprit and make tiny problems seem enormous, but it takes a higher con...

Without self-knowledge, we are vague about what we want to do with our lives.

Money always tends to be an urgent need, and we rush towards jobs that lock us into cages for decades, and we start to believe we are good for nothing, or not cut out for bigger roles.

1. Repetition Compulsion: We tend to go for a certain type, which may be tied to our childhood suffering, and in our unconscious search for a partner we would find suitable, we are repeatedly drawn towards a problematic person, and lack the self-knowledge to see the pattern.

Self-knowledge is the ultimate knowledge, and to know yourself is to know the meaning of life. There are millions of things we could know about ourselves, ranging from anecdotal to emotional or psychological matters. There are certain key bits of self-knowledge that we think migh...

1. The unconscious mind performs most of our tasks and even how we behave.
2. Our mind is divided into three parts: the primitive the limbic(emotions and memories) and the neocortex (higher reasoning). We are mostly operating from the primitive or emotio...

We are always more inclined to believe in what we feel.

When we become suspicious of our feelings and try to trust data and our rational mind, we move beyond biases and prejudice that exist in our feelings and emotions.

According to a Buddhist world-view, our anxieties and worries are not really important or purposeful but only seem so. Buddhist meditation wants our thoughts and anxieties to bother us less and tells us that these thoughts are nonsensical or meaningless.

Philosophi...