Know yourself and know that you know nothing.

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Socrates said "Know yourself".

To me, this does not mean to make a judgment of yourself or form an opinion about yourself, it does not mean to make any type of statement about yourself. It is about knowing yourself "moment to moment". Right now, at this moment, know yourself: know your thoughts, know your emotions, know your reactions, know the physical sensations, know your conditioning, know everything that is going on in you. And all that changes from moment to moment. So know yourself moment to moment, because whatever applied later, does not apply now, thinking that it does is judgment and judgment is limiting: you try to fit your life into your mental view of it; you do not allow for new things to happen, for change to take place.

Judgement is negative, negative in the sense that it "negates" the possibility. The possibility of something different to your pre-conceived idea.

I connect this also to the other famous sentence of Socrates "I only know that I know nothing", which seems to contradict the "know yourself" advice. But they go hand in hand: when you know yourself, you realize that you cannot make statements about yourself that will always hold true. You cannot know anything for sure.




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