Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.
—Ray Kurzweil
If you are motivated to achieve more in your life, you may have realized how important it is to understand your “self”. I have always been fascinated by the concept of self—and my mind, but began to learn about the power my mind holds about seven years ago. I started researching the mind and optimism—and found out a great deal about the power I hold. I will say that it got me far with my new outlook and accomplishing goals I set out. However, after I accomplished my goals, I almost felt the same way I felt when I first started studying the mind.
So, it seemed that I had to start over again… but this time, with a lot more experience under my life belt. If you have ever learned something—and then, forgotten it… and then remembered it again years later, please let me tell you that that is normal. Also realize that if there is something important (like the thing you forgot) you usually need to remind yourself of it every day. Keep watering those thought seeds each day—or they will eventually dissipate. The act of not remembering important concepts can also be seen as aletheia: an unfolding or continual disclosing of truth.
How social media can help you know your “self” better
You now find yourself with many opportunities to understand your mind—and create what dyouesire in life. The digital age, and change in political discussions, give you an open space to create your social life how you see fit. One of the most important abilities you now have is the chance to “know thyself” much more than ever before. People rush home from their place of work to engage in social media. You can use any free time you have to allow insights to your becoming. Learning how to know yourself can be an open-ended experience, inviting you to search your inner wisdom for meaning and direction. The process of knowing the self is always changing and transforming. It is a constant evolution.
What is important is giving yourself space and ritual that generates and supports your imagination during this time of becoming. Ultimately, you might find your “self” on your own, but the power of communal meaning helps a lot, which can be seen as necessary to the evolution of humanity. Thus, these same experiences can be seen in social media communities.
When taking part in social media (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.), you might feel and share a common vibration of internal oneness. By witnessing, albeit virtually, cause and effect scenarios through social media relations, a person might construct a new idea of what could be beyond their own identity and circumstance. Through this concept of knowing your self, infinite life concepts and emotions might be sensed and structured differently due to the engaging appeal of the communities.
Everything is generated through your own will power.
—Ray Bradbury
By interacting with internal concepts through social media, a person might find their way by working with new forms to represent unique ways to understand complex ideas. The individual can watch and navigate at once. The self now becomes part of the story––he is no longer a bystander. The experience becomes the individual’s new internal map of what he can become. A person no longer needs to experience a lone search for identity—only. Through the digital world, the internalization of the personal story becomes a communal experience. The man will only be alone if he chooses so now. He now has the choice to alienate himself or take turns in uncovering new layers of self and then come back to the community.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
—Ray Bradbury
Social media is still relatively new, and we are all still beginners in this new frontier. We are all learning new behaviors, new skill-sets, new ways of being, new viewpoints to our inner selves. When you confront parts in life with a beginner’s mind, you will find many ways to do something.
Thus, it helps to enter the digital experience with a beginner’s mind. Not a naive mind, but with the thoughts of newness and purity. Notice that things will come into being without effort when you use your beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind offers you the opportunity to believe in yourself honestly. Only plant the seeds that you want to grow in your mind. It is indeed true that we reap what we sow. My message is to use the world of social media to the benefit of understanding your “self” better, along with fellow digital trailblazers. Respect each other’s journeys—and we will see the digital era as a place where we all blossom.
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—Photo Credit: Flickr/Jason Howie