Jesus once said something to the effect that we see the speck in somebody else’s eye, but we don’t see the log floating in our own eye. We are so close to ourselves yet our eyes look out – they don’t look in. We see everything all around us but we don’t see ourselves. And on this quest it is of penultimate importance that we see ourself. If we are going to know God, first we must know ourselves.
It is a maxim in Sufism that to know your Lord you must know yourself. But to know yourself takes incredible determination because it’s very difficult to know the self. And the reasons for that are numerous, and they’re different for everybody. There’s a challenge in knowing the self, and the challenge is that we must be able to see our faults as well as our positive attributes. And the majority of mankind has great difficulty in looking at their own faults. It’s very easy to see other people’s faults; it’s very difficult to see our own faults.
The reason determination is needed here is because when people see their own faults, they become frightened, and that fright stops them from digging deeper. Once you see your own actions, once you see what you’ve done to others, once you see the difficulties that you’ve caused, most people recoil. And in that recoil they stop movement. They stop the progression of looking at the self. It becomes frightening. So it’s much easier to stop that process, and just go on with life, and not give that thought.
In most of the religions it is understood that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that you should have an understanding of your actions towards other people, and in that understanding, it comes from how you would expect to be treated.
The problem that most men face is they want to be treated with respect but they have trouble treating other people with respect, and unless you can treat other people with respect, you’re not going to get any. And we have to begin to understand how that works.
So we have to be courageous in this search for the self, we have to be brave. This is not a path for cowards. Satan is in our midst and he is constantly trying to overwhelm us into the thought that all of our inadequacies are appropriate, that all of our inappropriate actions are correct.
Ibn ‘Arabi said that Satan, when someone has arrogance, makes them think that all of their arrogant actions have somehow become appropriate, and he gives them the reasons. This is part of what he whispers. Satan is the great rationalizer; he will whisper in your ear and explain why whatever you did had merit and why it’s right. And unless you can catch that, and unless you can begin to become self-critical, you can’t move forward.
Self-criticism is an incredibly important part of self-knowledge, because until we become critical about certain parts of us, we won’t stop doing what it is we’re doing. So we have to begin with an understanding that we have difficulty, that each of us has difficulty. And the question that we have to ask ourselves is…
