I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the

inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe
in yourself and you believe that you're a person of influence and a
person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.
Joel Osteen

Before influencing others, we should be able to solve mystery of our own life and existence. A blind
person cannot show light to another blind person. If you answer that riddle of your own life, one
supposes, and the answer to all other mysteries will become clear. But what you think about the form
that answer will take? Words? A book? Intellectual thought? It seems unlikely, for these are all a part of
the mystery itself. And you cant answer a puzzle with a mystery.

How do you communicate with yourself and others? Language or thoughts? After all, what is language?
What are thoughts? And more important aspect is who is the one whos doing all this thinking and
questioning? If we cant answer that, then all the answers framed in words and thoughts are related to a
point of ignorance ignorance of ourselves. So who is the one who is asking these questions?

It seems pretty conspicuous that we can never really get sufficiently outside ourselves to have a
objective view on anything. Our views will always be clouded by emotions, prejudices, bias and attitudes
and our influence on others will always subjective. We want to solve the puzzle of thinking with our
thoughts. We want to know the nature of mind with our mind. We want to understand the nature of self
with our self. It is not a big deal to configure that that approach will lead us round in circles. It certainly
is a puzzling syndrome.

Is there, then, another way to look at things? If we cannot get outside ourselves, can we get inside
ourselves, and see things from another perspective? What can we say about our selves, anyway?
For a start, we are living beings. Conscious beings. We wake; we sleep; we dream. We imagine; we think;
we daydream. We can sleep deeply; we can sleep lightly. We can even become completely unconscious
like in coma. Yet even in the waking state, some persons are more conscious than other like our LinkedIn
influencers. More aware and more perceptive. Are there, then, levels of consciousness, levels of beings?
Can we expand the box of being we call our self, and become more conscious? And if so. How do we do
that? Of course, not by mental and psychological analysis, for that will keep us at the level of the very
mind and intellect that are conducting the analysis.

Then again, we are beings in a state of flux and inconstancy. Our thoughts and emotions change all the
time. Even the world itself continually changes all around us. Everything is in dynamic state. The
panorama presented to our senses, which we call our world, is forever shifting. Materialistic sciences tell
us that even so called static objects are constantly moving within themselves and at credible speeds,
too. Inside of us and outside of us, everything is changing.

We perceive this constant fluidity and flux as time. Yet time does not pass us by. We are forever in one
moment the now perceive change on dimension of time. Caught up in this constant flux, we mostly
live out our lives in reminiscences of past and worry for the future. Yet present is the only moment that
is truly real for us, that actually exists for us. But to learn to steady our being, in this one true moment,
to live in the eye of the storm of anxiety, stress and frustration, where all is peace in the midst of
turbulence, seems like a massive undertaking.

But we often wonder who is this I? Who is the one caught up in the travails of time? The body, the
photograph that we see in our LinkedIn profile? No, you can lose bits of the body, without losing bits of
your sense of self. And the body gets old, and wrinkled, and diseased, though the self may not. Are we
our mind, then? Thats getting closer. Our sense of self is certainly lodged in our mind. But it is forever
changing. Thoughts, moods, desires, attractions, aversions, images, and all the rest of it, pass through
our minds like a confused and never-ending script, with many scenes unfinished and unresolved. And
each, however fleeting, grabs the attention of our self. For certain fleeting period, it becomes our self.
We pronounce it I, as if it were the complete identity of us, despite the fact that the very next
moment, when external circumstances change, another I has ousted it, and taken over control.

So do we have a real and lasting self? Or are we, as the madman in the Christian gospels claimed,
Legion, for we are many possessed with demons, consumed by varied selves that do battle with
each other inside our heads?

Wise men and mystics say that all these selves are just an illusion, a show, transient, having no lasting
reality. All that really exists is the super-conscious or the One Being. He has made us parts of Himself,
and has projected this amazing and ever-changing show we call creation. The legion selves created by
our minds are only imaginary demons (or angels too), waiting to be exorcised and banished into
nothingness as we awaken to our true spiritual selves.

So much of our sense of being is founded upon a mistaken sense of who we are, upon an ephemeral and
transient self, upon primal egotism. This is the essential characteristic of the human mind. So how can
we influence others when we are unable to influence ourselves as we do not know who we are?