“If you walk the path that you build with your own hands every day, you will arrive where you need to be.”
-Egyptian proverb
In the continuous yearning for wisdom, which enriches the lives of those who are not afraid to call themselves philosophers, the search for and encounter with one’s own inner being occupies a prominent place. This activity can often lead to uncontrolled egotism if it is not accompanied by a healthy moral life. The search for one’s own inner being is a reflection of the search for and revelation of the great laws of the Universe. Finally, the hermetic aphorism that says “as above, so below” has not lost its value at all despite the passage of centuries.
In philosophy, therefore, the quest for and finding of those truths that help to form a complex picture of existence remain. Thanks to this spirit of exploration, smaller or greater inspirations are born in us, prompted by a forgotten proverb, advice from ancient sages stored in the tombs of those who lived in their aura. But it is of no use to us to revive the past without taking action in the present and implementing the acquired knowledge in our lives. Delve into deep teachings in the spirit of the present time. This is also the case with the epitaph at the beginning of this article. Short and concise, it obliges us to pause in the mad rush of the mind and dissect word by word the content of these simple keys that relate to the miraculous art of being oneself.
Today, the concept of being oneself has been reduced to a common expression that concerns well-being and the protection of the body, as well as the gratification of the unruly and confused mind. Being oneself is merely reduced to dedication to the struggle and breaking through life, to disobedience to anyone and anything, even oneself, because being oneself is still not something that is truly present in our consciousness.
However, encountering oneself cannot be avoided. Some people waste their time preoccupied with the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the punishment in the afterlife, fears that haunt them even in the most secluded corners of their being. The real danger lies, although it may not seem so, in not knowing oneself, in lacking authenticity and solid foundations.
Building the path
This is the fundamental stage of the art in question. We do not get anywhere, especially not to ourselves, if we do not build the path we need to follow. Are we really building it?
Most of the time, we don’t even look where we’re going. We follow the human stream, the crowd that moves along paths made of changes of mind, sudden and incomprehensible, that also change our flow. But everyone is going there, including us. We withdraw along paths littered with losses that everyone leaves behind as they progress or stay in place if they dare not move forward. We stumble not on difficulties, but on obstacles that we ourselves set in our way.
Building is hard. However, sometimes building consists of sweeping old forgotten paths, well-trodden trails that have served for centuries to reach a certain goal, which may today covered in dust and gravel. However, these roads are more convenient than the crowded ones of those who do not know where they are going. The humble man who cleans, weeds, and removes stones from the edges, opens and builds roads by bringing them back to life.
If there are people braver than others, it is their duty to open new paths. These brave individuals must have enough knowledge because it is impossible to build a road without a clear idea of the starting and ending point, the bends, and the tunnels that need to be pierced through rock to reach the goal.
The strangest thing about all of this is that the builders and those who know where they come from and where they are going are not always the most listened to and followed. At best, their paths are proclaimed as utopias and delusions, and their creators are considered lost. They are not given any credit for their good intentions in their actions. The mass that moves without seeing or hearing wants to believe that other possibilities are wrong, expressed with an obvious intention to deceive humanity. Who else could it be different when those who judge are precisely people with the most confused ideas.
Day after day.
Just one day is not enough for construction. Here, as elsewhere, time becomes a great temptation. We need to have enough patience to maintain enthusiasm day after day, without losing sight of the goal, no matter how far it may be. What matters is not the time but the goal. When the spirit clearly grasps the meaning of that goal, time mysteriously shortens…
The real possibility of building a day is through continuity. Working constantly and persisting does not mean turning into an automaton or a slave to our actions.
What is needed is conscious continuity that collects successes as if they were miraculous stones from which the most marvelous palace imaginable will eventually sprout. This continuity requires enthusiasm that makes us fully enter the essence of the goal that interests us.
The body works filled with a sense of satisfaction and the idea of progress. The path should The creation is progressing day by day. It grows from within and without, creating its place in the world and leading to previously unknown spaces of the soul.
This challenging art – being oneself – requires constant energy renewal. We all have a reserve of energy that, if exhausted in our initial attempts, disappears and leaves us feeling empty and lost. Like all forces of the Universe, this energy is spent and cyclically renewed. Conscious input of energy into our work automatically creates new energy sources that will serve us to continue day by day, becoming stronger every time. This means living a full life, truly enriching ourselves with every hour, every day, expanding the possibilities of experiences and work, gaining security or making mistakes, and then correcting the move made. This is the quality of a builder.
With our own hands
The false criterion of comfort that has conquered the minds of our contemporaries has greatly devalued individual work, work done with our own hands. a.
Intelligence, to put it mildly, has transformed into the skill of exploiting others, so that the “crafty” ones can reap the rewards of others’ labor. Those who succeed in this game may be the most advanced, but also the most unhappy, because if suddenly deprived of the help of others, they would find themselves in a hopeless situation, unable to continue. A lack of practice and self-confidence would prevent them from building, as well as following the beaten paths, because they would feel so crippled that they wouldn’t even be able to take a step forward.
Our hands are a symbol, one of the noblest instruments at our disposal. The one who knows how to use their hands for truly useful work also knows how to channel their emotions and manage their mind. They know how to use their willpower and find a way through problems that may seem insurmountable to others.
What is done with hands and consciousness has a soul. Hands can only move matter, and the path we are talking about is not solely material.
It is necessary to to establish the true value of personal work. It should not be understood only as pure creative work because personal work also consists of accurately repeating what we have learned.
Great teachers educate, show paths, and broaden horizons, but they cannot do the work for us. Even if they could, they don’t, because then the achieved success would actually be the success of those who are already a few steps ahead of us. And what would happen to us if we only watched others fulfill what we must fulfill? What kind of builders would we be if we didn’t dare to lift a single stone?
The place where we need to be
Let’s repeat once again that it is not a place that physically exists somewhere in the world, nor is it a certain position or prestigious function. There are places within ourselves that we often do not know how to reach, but once we conquer them, they gift us with the ability to reach all the peaks.
Where do we need to be? That is the question of the path that opens up within a person in relation to art. of self. The place where we should be does not always coincide with the place where we would like to be.
Our tastes are subjected to numerous psychological pressures, and we rarely question whether these tastes are truly ours or they are a reflection of some external influence.
We need to be where we can meet ourselves, where all our causes and consequences point to a clear and correct place. This way, we can gain enough awareness of our true reality in order to move forward on our path.
The concept of being is not something static. Only those who surrender to inertia and apathy remain in such a state of being, those who become easy prey to despair and succumb to the attractive game of fashion, those who fall into anger and violence, who destroy themselves without even realizing it because they lack the strength of discernment. They just are. They do not move or, if they do, they do so as part of a confused crowd that follows the instructions of their hidden masters.
The other form of being that we propose is an active form, as it involves being full of oneself. Being present and conscious in every moment and every action we take, we progress in building and traversing the path. There is no lack of teachings that can help turn this idea into reality. When we learn to ignite the light of our inner being, we begin to transform into masters of the art of being ourselves.
And more than that: we learn that being something is relative. It is impossible to speak of a final state of a person because they live in the spirit of continuous improvement. To be means to reach a pinnacle on the path, a point at which we can reflect on the steps taken and determine the steps that await us.
Being is a pause before a new beginning.
The path we are building is eternal and requires continual action from us, as the goal moves further away and rises higher as we believe we are reaching it.
Where to be? On the path, active and aware. That is the area where we need to be. That is the point where the encounter with ourselves finally takes place. That is the place from which we can find our true nature. We must continue to embrace all the challenges that destiny holds for us. The essence of it all is to find our own way through our own effort, with our own hands, day by day. Everything else belongs to the path and the goal that existed long before we became aware of it.