Why is Self-Knowledge Important?

Coming to self-knowledge can be difficult, but it is doable.

To know yourself intimately it means getting to know your thoughts and feelings, where they came from, and what they do to affect your behavior. This will not always be fun because there is always apart of ourselves that we do not want to face.

It also about knowing your desires, motivations, needs, and values are in life. What makes you get up every morning? What makes you motivated to do your job? Why do you look up to this person? Why do you trust this person and not this one?

Philosophers talked about knowing yourself in order to be more human and come to a perfection of man. Holy people like Eastern monks and Saints of the Catholic Church have emphasized that if you want to advance in the spiritual life, you have to know yourself. Self-knowledge and its importance have been around a long time, back with the philosophers Aristotle and Plato.

You have to look inside yourself, pay close attention to your thoughts, how do they come about and how do they leave? The way to do this is in times of solitude and quiet, do it when you have time to journal and be able to step back and analyze your thoughts and feelings. If you are always busy and on the run, you will never have time to look at your thoughts and give commentary on them.