Daily Reflection 2.9.21

 Sun Tzu ends Chapter 3 will the most well-known quotation from all of his work:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
 

What is there to say here? This is the key to the whole work and to success in any field of endeavor. Know yourself as far as you can and in particular as it pertains to your goal. Know your enemy, which is the sum total of all those forces that stand between you and your goal. 

Now, in Sun Tzu's context, self-knowledge means knowledge of one's army, its composition and disposition, its fighting ability, its logistical needs, and so on. The enemy is the opposing army, its country, and every other detail pertinent to winning a war. 

For us, self-knowledge means knowledge of our particular capabilities and weaknesses as they pertain to accomplishing our objectives. To give an example-- I know that I do very well at jobs in which I have to work with people, speak in public, or manage a team. I also do manual labor very well. Give me a difficult task and leave me alone, or put me in charge of a project with a crew under me, and I'll get the job done. But I am absolutely terrible-- I mean unbelievably, hilariously bad-- at any kind of office job in which I'm to be left alone in a room with a computer connected to the internet. You can put me in that room at 9:00 in the morning with a single task to accomplish, and I won't get it done. Come back at 4:30 and I'll have 30 browser tabs open, ranging from news and political analyses, classic works of philosophy, tips on cooking and homebrewing, guitar tabs, histories of my favorite sports teams or UFC fighters, Google street-view explorations of countries I'll never go to-- anything but that one boring online task that happens to be my actual job. 

(Even these posts, which are both short and enjoyable to write, are hard for me to focus on from beginning to end. Right now, I have 16 tabs open, including my email, 2 Facebook conversations, 3 articles on election fraud, a youtube video of a mass at a Catholic church in New England, two Amazon kindle books, Sallust's On the Gods and the World and chapter 4 of Machiavelli's The Prince. I think the technical term for this is "ADD." )

The point, though, is that I know this about myself. If I decide that I need a new job, I'm going to look for either something where I'm either in charge of a group or doing manual labor, or both. Most types of office work are just not for me-- not unless I want to commit to getting fired after a month or two, anyway. 

This is a rather quotidian example, but underneath it lies a very important principle. Eliphas Levi wrote:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of a man by himself. That is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future: it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will, assuring him the universal dominion over Azoth and the domain of Magnesia, in other words, full power over the Universal Magical Ancient. 

The conquest of the self is precisely that conquest of our own soul, its liberation from the rule of passions and external and chaotic forces, its placement under the rule of the spirit and the gods, that we've been discussing over and over in these posts. And in order to achieve this conquest, we must have two things: knowledge, and the capacity to act on that knowledge.

Who are we really? How are our actions constrained by our innate capacities and the weight of our habits? What do we want to achieve, and how can we work with our innate capacities to do so, and how can we expand those capacities?

Those are the great questions, the answers to which are the work of a lifetime and the heart of spiritual development.