First of all, what in gods name does being yourself even mean? We keep hearing it everywhere and all the time. Be yourself, its a mantra that also sucked me in many years ago.
What does it mean?
Obviously to be oneself one needs to first and foremost know oneself.
How to know your self?
Do you know your self by studying your self with your mind? THe same way one learn’s mathematics or history?
Is knowing yourself based on intellect and memory or is it something else?
I say its something else.
Something much more intuitive and existential.
The intellectual mind only knows a thing by analyzing and deducting, it cannot know the entirety of something. It needs the parts, and that is fine. But to know yourself, you are taking on a greater task than simply learning about the aspects of you.
You are a totality, and you cannot fathom this totality with your deductive mind. You can try, but you will not get very far.
My advice and nirvanic insight is to try to understand yourself through the pure perceiving of consciousness.
What does that mean?
Since consciousness is characterized by being conscious and aware, then that is the way to know yourself. Become more conscious and aware of yourself.
Your body, your thoughts, your feelings, emotions, aspirations and lastly your sense of existing.
Be aware of your primordial I-thought, the root of the ego or the first principle of consciousness. Your presence.
This is how you truly come to know yourself, not psychoanalytically but deeply intuitively.
And only when you know yourself will you be yourself, no matter your surroundings. Whether you are in hell or heaven, the north or the south. The moon or saturn. You will always be yourself.
Try it out and see.
My name is just a name, I am not my name, I am the nameless because the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.