How do you gauge self knowledge?

[Moralm]

I feel that I am pretty far along when it comes to self-knowledge, but I would like to use some sort of objective means of measuring where I am at. What kind of guidelines would people in this community recommend? What kind of questions do you think are the most important to ask yourself? What specific things are the most important for a person to know about themselves? My general feeling is that the most important things to understand about yourself is what is important to you and why, why you follow the habits that you do (and why you are resistant to good habits if you are in fact resistant to them), why you have the emotional reactions that you do, and what your biases are.  Am I incorrect in thinking that these are primary concerns in self-knowledge? Are there other things that are more important?

[Pepin]

I would add having an understanding of your subjective experience and how your mind functions. Like when you remember something, how do you experience that? When you think conceptually, how do you experience that? How does my vision work, like what an I actually seeing? How do I conceptualize various groups of objects and people?

 

A small example with myself is tracing seemingly random thoughts back to their origin. I might all of sudden stand thinking about bats and echo location, which I can trace back to seeing a person I know recently who has a blind friend, and having recently read a Dawkins book which talked about bats

 

Another aspect is being aware of human behavior in general. The book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow goes into thinking biases and cognitive downfalls which are found in humans. For instance, humans are very bad at thinking statistically, so when a matter involves statistics, I ought to slow down. There is also the bias of "someone else will help", which may seem reasonable, but often can create issues as it is shared.

 

What I mean to suggest is that your history and beliefs are only a portion to knowing yourself. Understanding how you sense and perceive the world, how you experience your thoughts and ideas, how your thoughts and beliefs are structured and related, as well as evolution shaped deficits which are detrimental to our thinking are all critical to self knowledge.

[Drew.]

I think that those are some pretty good things to know about oneself. I lump in self-therapy with self-knowledge, so I also try to explore different aspects of my self that formed due to trauma to heal and resolve those issues.

 

I don't think that there is any objective standard that one can use. I tend to compare myself to myself. Who was I six months ago, and who am I today? How have I changed? How have I grown? What is still the same?

[_LiveFree_]

An easy and for the most part accurate way to judge is the level and frequency of which you are triggered by other people's dysfunctions. It's the crap we don't face that always seems to find us through someone else's actions.

[dsayers]

How much of your emotional experiences are you able to identify where from/why you feel that way? I think this is a good indication of your level of self-knowledge. How many of your emotional experiences surprise you? I think these represent a gap in self-knowledge.

 

I agree with Pepin that self-knowledge isn't entirely about self, but also an understanding of how humans think/behave and why as well. Keeping this in mind, I think another indicator of self-knowledge is how well you're able to identify the level of self-knowledge others exhibit. For example, somebody was talking to me recently when they revealed that they believe in ghosts. In doing so, they were telling me that they do not accept that such a claim would require proof even though proof is a requisite for certainty.

[Pepin]

I don't think someone has a large amount of self if they don't accept that they are a collection of parts. At the very least, this would consist of being aware of what is conscious and unconscious.

 

Those with more self knowledge distinguish between conscious thoughts which are not self and non self generated. I feel as though many people attribute almost all of their thoughts and thinking to the self, when they had nothing to do with it.

 

An example is with worrying. The mind takes off in its own in a tirade of thoughts, while the self often tries to manage and control the anxiety. Understanding that there is a part of the brain which is generating all of these worries and that though it is conscience that it is a part other than you coming up with is essential to understand what you are in context to your neurology, and what you aren't.