Are You a Student of Your Own Nature?

Are You a Student of Your Own Nature?

How do you know things? Have you ever wondered about this? A great deal of our knowledge is based on hearsay. Much of what we believe, we have heard from our parents. Many of our values come from them.

Are you a student of your own nature? This is totally different form being a student of things outside yourself. To study math or chemistry is vastly different form studying ourselves. Very few individuals are interested in studying themselves. Therefore, very few people are able to grow. I shall give you an example: Harold had to have a statement from his father’s accountant as a partial requirement in obtaining a contractor’s license. He asked his father’s accountant what he would charge for preparing the statement. The accountant answered. “Not much.” This satisfied Harold. To his surprise, and then anger, he received a bill or $70.00 from the accountant for a brief amount of work.

Harold called his father to complain about the bill. The father also thought the accountant’s charged was high, but said to Harold, “If you have learned a lesson from this, the $70.00 will have been well spent.” His father has expressed this idea on several past occasions, but Harold had not learned anything form these experiences.

I suggested to Harold that he get a pencil and paper and begin to really study his nature. Actually he has paid $70.00 for a course in the school of life. But if he does not lean anything form it, he will have wasted $70.00 and in the future he will have similar experiences. In order to learn about himself from this experience, Harold has to force his mind to come to new ideas. Memory doesn’t help here, because in his memory storeroom there are no answers.

There is in all of us, as in Harold, a tremendous inertia in our minds. In order to deal with problems concerning our nature, we must face far more inertial than when thinking about things outside our nature with which we are not emotionally involved. You have probably heard the saying that if we do not learn from history, history will repeat itself. This is true of personally history as well as world history.

Are you interested in studying your own character with the same objectivity with which you approach problems outside of yourself? Then you will have to force your mind to be active. You will have to overcome the asleep state of you mind.