Is it even possible to get to know your true self

Classic posts chosen by the admins of xBKChat.com and the users of this website
  • Message
  • Author
User avatar

enlightened

ex-BK

  • Posts: 208
  • Joined: 30 Aug 2007

Is it even possible to get to know your true self

Post12 Oct 2013

I have a question for you all.

From your experience, do you find it even possible to get to know who you really are after years of cult brainwashing?

Can I really tap into my true being?

I was led to believe that the Brahma Kumaris way of life was to tap into the real self! To become who we really are. However, the reality is that I have moved away from everything that might have been me. I have become someone who is quite withdrawn and feels alien to the real world as a result of Brahma Kumaris teachings and meditation.

It would be interesting if any ex-cult members from any worldwide cult have actually been able to get to know their true selves.

Thanks
Enlightened
User avatar

ex-l

ex-BK

  • Posts: 10661
  • Joined: 07 Apr 2006

Re: Is it even possible to get to know your true self

Post12 Oct 2013

It's a very good and deep question, and one worth contemplating. I think the answer is no and even if it was, it's probably not worth any effort trying to do so. What's more important is learning the tools to live in the daily like you find yourself in right now ... whatever that daily life is. BKism only prepares you for life inside the BK. If you try and follow their theory ... and largely it is just theory ... in the real world, you will be torn to pieces and trashed.
enlightened wrote:Can I really tap into my true being?

I was led to believe that the Brahma Kumaris way of life was to tap into the real self!

I suppose the first questions to ask are, do you even have a real self and does it really matter?

I strongly agree with you that the Brahma Kumari identity is not any "real" self. How could it be ... they're constantly changing what their "truth" is! The core of Brahma Kumarism was born in Lekhraj Kirpalani's mental illness and delusion, and the social and psychological traumas the Om Mandlites experienced. What one is enculturated into are the ripples of those times and experience - someone else's lessons and experiences not yours - 'made as truths', and of unhealthy co-dependent mental illness and delusion.

It's like being fostered into a dysfunctional family and made to fit it. A dysfunctional, co-dependent family where no one is allow to question "Daddy's" behaviour (and now the Dadis's behaviour) when Daddy is clear delusional. It's being told "everything Daddy Lekhraj (or no Dadi Kirpalani) is truth" and you must fit to it ... even when they are constantly contradicting themselves and hiding things.

Back to your question, is it possible to know your true self? I think the idea of knowing one's true self is just a monkey trap. You know, the old 'sweets-in-the-bottom-of-a-jug' trap where the monkey is trapped because they won't let go of the sweets.

We are trapped grasping onto unattainable ideals ... so just let go. Stop grasping.

I'd suggest people should giving up the idea, being as happy and content as you can, live within your own limits, learn how to manage any pain, and create the self you want to me ... but keep it as a very down to earth level. Let the gods, angels and absolute truth take care of themselves. They don't need servants.

Religion is just 95% a business. There are other businesses to get into. The only good thing I will say about BKism is that they cured me of ever wanting to be a guru or be involved with the business of religion. Religion is a business with far too many messed up abusive perverts in it and plain nasty, twisted people who cannot even be honest about it.

I'll allow others to say more as they wish but I will say the inspiration which helped me the most was the poetry (I am not going to call it philosophy but I suppose it is) of the Tao Te Ching(Book of the Way). It's just good common sense. Stuff like ...
Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better for everyone.

Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And rediscover filial piety and love.

Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will disappear ...
Better stop short than fill to the brim.
Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it.
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of heaven.

That, and the essence of Buddhism which I see as, a) "everything is impermanent" ... everything changes, even the bad frames of minds if you just hold on or go to bed ... and b) "irritations, suffering, anxiety and unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) are a pain but normal", so learn to reduce them or live with them.

Religion is also 95% bullsh**. You're better of going to do amateur dramatics and learning how to act like a person you want to be, to act differently.

Just to prove the point, I was looking for links to copies of the Tao Te Ching and on the first page of Google found this, Lao Tzu Part 1 of 2: Tao Te Ching: Give Up Your Concepts, where some Indian ... in all seriousness ... claims to know that Lao Tzu "according to tradition re-incarnated as Albert Einstein" (around 0:58)!

Bear in mind, Lao Tzu as a real person probably did not even exist ... and the evidence proves the book was written by numerous authors over a long period of time. What's interesting for me is to look at his eyes as he says so.
User avatar

Pink Panther

  • Posts: 1885
  • Joined: 14 Feb 2013

Re: Is it even possible to get to know your true self

Post13 Oct 2013

Love the Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching! One of humankind's masterpieces.
Is it even possible to get to know your true self?

I suppose you could say that you get to know yourself more and more each day.

And what you find is the person you thought you knew yesterday has actually changed a bit more. If you ever knew yourself fully one day, and next day it was still the same person, and the next day too, and the next year ... what then?

Another way to see it is that only when we are breathing our last breath will we have been all that we were in that life and be able to say, "now I am fully me. Bye". Once the fruit is ripe, it starts decomposing.

The true self is like the idea that there's a "purpose for my life I have to discover". On one level, it's a sincere impetus to better oneself, but there's a self-trickery that goes on when we think that there is someone, a me that's already there, pre-existing, in the past - that we will discover some time in the hopefully not too distant future. But what was then is not now.

If it is a blue print of me I want to know - well, yes, it's like living in a building but wanting to see the architectural plans that gave rise to it. Helpful in some ways but in the end, it's what "is" that matters, what was "actualised" according to quality of materials, tradesmen, budget at the time, climate etc etc more than what was "proposed" .

(Leaving aside the distraction of Karma) - My "abstract" blueprint might be my DNA and cultural environment etc, my potential talent, my parenting, my neighbourhood, education, and other factors will all affect how my "blueprint" potentials turn out. A woman with an inquiring mind born into a riverside jungle village in 11th century Congo will become a different person to the woman of inquiring mind born in 21st century New York.

Our crowded, urban societies demand both larger and smaller loyalties and so we've a malleable and complex sense of who we are (maybe why the question arises more), more so than an indigenous tribesman who is part of a small remote clan that barely survives, living as a unit tuning into the land and the climate and animal behaviour.

Sure, there is a constant that I can call "myself" - it's a thread that runs through all my changes, a consciousness that allows me to function and survive and prosper. Is my true "self" what I was when i was young and innocent, before the aggregation of experiences? Or, is my true self found after I've aged and been changed by experiences, am I now "Self Plus"?

Getting a bit more scientific and philosophical, if someone has Alzheimer's, so has practically no memory of their past or of their relations, they still are what they are, in that state, they've become different to what they were. They feel their feelings, desires and emotions in that moment but, without memory, cannot "compare" them with what they previously felt or desired etc. They may become completely uninhibited or really intolerant of things that never bothered them, opposite to how they once were.

What I am capable of in any circumstance is part of to what/who I am, it affects it.

If I lose an arm, I might say "I am still me" but I am different to some extent, depending on how the arm influenced me. If I am right handed and lose my right arm, it will affect me differently to my loss of my left arm.

If I was a cello player, losing either arm is going to make me live a different life to what i would have otherwise, so I will become a different person.We cannot say it has no effect on who we are.

A tiny woman who is kind, meek, mild and would not hurt a fly is capable of extreme violence if her infant is seriously threatened - this not based on anything she "knows" about herself. When her "rising to the occasion" happens, is that called her lower self or her higher self? The terms are interchangeable. Doing what's necessary seems "superior" to me.

Who/what I am not will essentially determine who/what I am - and what I think I am.

If I can no longer conceive of others, like we find in extreme autism, or feel no empathy, like extreme sociopaths, then who "I am" has changed. So much of it is based on what I can "know" and see defined by certain values.

(It's the same old riddle, only starts from the middle)

If we take the idea that "I" extend as far as the point of contact of my senses - if I am the taster, but I am not what is tasted, nor am I the [act of] tasting, these are distinct. What is written is different to the act of writing, is different to the writer. Or as per the old riddle -"can an eye see itself", similarly, can the known be the knower? Hence Carl Jung's infatuation with the Undiscovered Self and the perpetual act of individuation (becoming oneself - a never ending task).

Do I "improve" with age and become a better person, more "myself" over time - or do I get stuck, and become a stereotype of who I was, inflexible, a caricature?

Again the trap is thinking things like Self and Purpose are somehow fixed and constant, just there out of sight and out of reach, some grand master plan that was 'flashed" but we've somehow blinked and missed ...

There is no grand master task, purpose or self to be realised. Like breathing, eating, brushing teeth, there's just a lot of little ones to be done, taken pride in for a short time then let go of. No living on past glories. We just do them again, each in their own way, each on their own day, and each time I am different and I become different.

Return to Classic Posts