How much of who you think you are has really been put upon you by your life experiences? By your parents? By your culture and society? Most significantly, are your beliefs really yours or have you unwittingly adopted the beliefs of the people who've influenced you? Are you really yourself?

    To find ourself we must distance ourself from all external influences. Our religious beliefs perhaps more than anything else about us are usually not our own. My premise here is that God communicates with each of us in the core of our own being but so long as we are what the world has made us we are not in touch with our true self and thus are not in touch with God within. The truth which comes from outside us, from society, is relative and subjective. Absolute truth comes only from within, is revealed to each of us directly if only we are open to receiving it. God is who God tells us God is. We are who we are. Neither God nor ourself is what we are led to believe by other people. So long as we listen to external guidance we do not hear the truth which lies within.
    To know yourself, then, is to know Truth as Truth is rather than as human society, with its imperfections, would have us believe. Most other people don't know what they are talking about when they talk about God and Truth because they are not speaking from the core of their own being. They speak from what other people before them, people who knew no better than them, have said.
    We each start fresh. Question what you have learned from others and search the hidden recesses of your own being, your own private experiences, for what the Truth is for you. Then you will know yourself. One way of doing this is to try this thought experiment: if you had somehow grown up on a deserted island with no one around to influence your thinking and belief, what would you believe? If you disregard what others have taught you to believe (intentionally or unintentionally taught), what would you believe? Another thought experiment: if you'd grown up in some other culture would you still believe what you do today? (Be honest now: if you'd never been introduced to the concept of "God" or the person of Jesus Christ would you really still believe what you do?) If not then clearly, your beliefs are not your own; they have been influenced by your environment and you still need to find yourself.

    If your personal identity is bound up in your past experiences then, when these experiences end, when the familiar surroundings you are accustomed to change, when the past is gone, you will lose yourself. People who are devastated by change are so devastated because that change threatens all they are familiar with which was an intimate part of their own existence. However, if you know yourself from the inside out, if you are not attached to externals (which you can't take with you as you travel through time and space) then you do not go through an "identity crisis" when things change because you are not bound to those things and thus you do not change even as your environment does. If you truly know yourself then you always know who you are and where you stand no matter the context of your changing and temporary surroundings. The only thing you take with you is yourself. Know yourself!

    If your identity is linked to a particular people then those people are more important to you than any other people and you take sides, you show favoritism and are unwilling or even unable to relate well to those who are not one of "your own kind" (be it race, country or religion). But if you are your own person then all people from all cultures are equal in your eyes and you can be objective. You can accept strangers and strange ideas because they do not threaten your concept of who you are. You can be critical of your "own" people because such honest criticism is not self criticism. And, in being so critical, you purge yourself of whatever remains of foreign (i.e., external) influence on yourself.

    The most important thing to know about yourself is what you believe because your beliefs are the basis of everything else about your life and thought. If your beliefs are not really yours but what others have taught you then your life is not your own. So, just how does one go about discovering what one truly believes? One way is to expose yourself to all beliefs (the "other culture" experiment). This accomplishes two things:

1. It breaks you out of the mold which your upbringing and culture have put you into.

2. It provides you with an opportunity to try out new beliefs and see which ones naturally appeal to you and which ones do not. Those which appeal to you do so because they "ring true" to who you really are.

    For those who argue that we are the sum total of our experiences... if this is so then what it comes down to is that we are, ultimately, nothing, a blank slate! If this is true then we could have become anything and what we have become is arbitrary, a circumstance of birth, of chance and, thus, meaningless in any absolute sense. Thus, your identity - who you think you are - is either insignificant or a lie. Identity gained from experience must be superseded by self determined identity through an inner search of and for the self.