Knowing yourself is not so much about introspection as interaction. To know yourself is to realize that you are more than the little self that has been given to you by your history—the pattern that others made—that your true self is, in truth, much larger and includes other people, other cultures, other species even. That life is less about BEING and more about INTERBEING. We come to know ourselves, then, through coming to know each other. And the deeper that knowledge, the richer and more creative the world we build together.
At a conference on the Iranian poet Hafez I attended recently, one of the older Persian speakers suddenly leaned forward to the audience and said, "Make your work The Face of the Beloved, and let what you create be her lashes, her mole, her lips." To do that would mean carrying all these gifts, letting the radiance of the World beyond the world shine into each cottage door you come to. Doing so requires both huge strength and the capacity for a kind of visible luminosity, an active principle that can only be born from a great stillness.