Know Thyself

"Know thyself" (Greek: Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton) is a philosophical maxim which was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi. The best-known of the Delphic maxims, it has been quoted and analysed by numerous authors throughout history and has been applied in many ways.

We assume we know who we are.

But how can we be sure?

I used to think getting to knowing myself was about finding something better than what I was, about searching for something hidden. A truth buried beneath the noise.

But I see now—it’s not hidden. It’s right here. It’s always been right here.

The problem isn’t that we search for something hidden. The problem is that we don’t want to face the truth of what we find.

Because if we really look—if we strip away the stories, the illusions, the masks we wear—what do we find?

Contradiction.

The discomfort of being both the person we are and the person we wish we were. The mess of memories we thought we had outgrown. The flashes of understanding that vanish just as quickly as they appear. And we handicap ourselves with thoughts of wanting to be someone with certainty. or believing that we already know who we are.

But that’s not how this life we've been given works.

Knowing yourself isn’t about knowing. It’s about recognising.

It's not building something stable, but watching—with brutal honesty—the way you shift from moment to moment.

Yesterday, I was sure. Today, I hesitate.

Yesterday, I was kind. Today, I withdraw.

Yesterday, I thought I had grown. Today, I see I am still learning.

We want knowing ourselves to be a destination. A solid ground. But what if it’s a tide?

What if real self-awareness isn’t a set of truths, but the ability to stand in the shifting currents of perception without reaching for certainty?

I once heard my teacher say, “You have to enable every person to see himself from every angle.”

Not just the angles we like. Not just the parts that fit neatly into our idea of who we are.

Every angle.

The part of you that hopes.

The part of you that hides.

The part of you that judges and the part of you that loves unconditionally.

Because we are all of it.

And the moment you resist one, you lose sight of the whole.

For sooooo long, I searched for the answers to who I am, always feeling misunderstood and unseen. I needed to find something to hold onto, something that would finally make me feel whole. But no matter how much I tried to pin it down, my sense of self kept shifting, who I thought I was, no one else did.

At the beginning of my studies I read an article from Baal HaSulam—my teachers teachers teacher ;) and something inside was opened to a new perception of who and what I am completely.

He spoke of a worm, born inside a radish, believing the whole world was as bitter and small as the space it had always known. The worm had no concept of anything beyond its walls—until one day, the radish split open. And for the first time, it saw what had been outside all along. A vast, limitless world. A reality so much greater than it had ever imagined.

The worm like me, like us, had mistaken the walls of its own perception for the limits of reality itself.

Baal HaSulam didn’t tell this story to entertain. He told it to awaken something in us. And it does!

We are all born into our own radish, thinking that what we see, what we feel, what we know, is all there is. We build identities, ideas, entire belief systems based on the tiny fraction of reality we can perceive. And because we have never seen beyond it, we assume there is nothing else.

But the radish is not reality.

It is only our starting point.

Everything we think we are—our labels, our memories, our carefully constructed sense of self—is just the inside of the radish. The moment we recognise this, a crack forms. A space opens. And in that space, a choice appears:

Will we stay inside, clinging to the familiar, or will we step beyond the only world we have ever known?

I don’t think we ask ourselves this question directly. Most of the time, it shows up as discomfort. A quiet dissonance between the life we are living and something we can’t quite name. At first, it’s easy to ignore. The mind is good at explaining things away. You tell yourself you’re overthinking. That everyone feels this way sometimes. That it will pass.

But it doesn’t pass.

Anxiety grows, depression sets in. A persistent hum beneath the surface of your life, pressing against the edges of your certainty forces you out of yourself time and time again.

That is getting to know yourself, this is life teaching us in the raw experiences, putting us face first toward the unknown. Because once you step outside the radish, there is no going back. The walls that once felt like reality are now too small to contain you. The identity you once clung to no longer fits. And for a time, that can feel like being lost. Because if you are not that—then what are you?

This is where I see most people turn back. They retreat into what is familiar, even if it no longer fits. Because uncertainty feels like emptiness, and emptiness feels like death, and death is unacceptable for a life wanting to be lived.

But it isn’t death. It is space.

Space to unlearn.

Space to un-become.

Space to see without the filters of past perception.

And if you can sit in that space—if you can resist the urge to rush back into definitions—The mind stops searching to define itself.

And in that stillness, something else emerges.

Not an answer.

A presence.

The quiet awareness that you are here.

The world is changing. You can feel it.

Nothing makes sense anymore. Systems are collapsing. People are restless, uncertain. There’s a growing sense that we are on the edge of something—but no one can quite put it into words.

And that’s because, for the first time, the radish is cracking open on a collective level.

People are questioning things they once accepted as truth. Reality itself is starting to feel unstable, as if the structure we once relied on is revealing its own limitations.

The cracks are appearing.

And if you’ve felt this—if you’ve sensed that something is shifting—you are already at the edge of a new perception with everyone, all on the edge of the unknown.

No longer in our own certainty.

No longer the versions we’ve been taught to be.

No longer holding onto the identities you’ve built.

But the part of you that exists as you are

And that—That is where we begin to know..

At the edge of ourselves.

At the threshold where everything unfolds into the beautiful, relentless beginning of The Together Unknown.