The spiritual path stands and falls with the realization of what man is, how he is constituted: What am I, how am I, who am I. “Know thyself”, “Gnothi se auton”: this is the heading above the temple of Delphi, where the prophetess Pythia orated the destinies of the questioners.  This self-knowledge is the decisive key to a successful, fulfilled life in which man realizes his destiny. When I know who I am, I know after what, how and in what direction I lead my life. The thematization of self-knowledge can be found in the most diverse areas of human culture:

Literature:

“As in every man, there lived in Nekhlyudov two men, the moral man, who sought his good in the good of others, and the animal man, who sought only his own good and was ready to sacrifice the whole world to this good …”

(Leo N. Tolstoy: Resurrection; Vol. I, Ch. 14)

    Painting:

In his painting “The Drowned Boy,” Norwegian artist Edvard Munch depicts a light and a dark male figure walking side by side, meant to represent the two sides of the same person struggling to dominate man. The artist himself comments as follows:

“The division of the soul, … like two birds tied together each striving for his side … a terrible struggle in the cage of the soul.”
(Munch-museet. Oslo 2007)

Philosophy:

Arthur Schopenhauer on the question of who he was: “In the heart is human being, not in the head. It is true that we are accustomed … to regard the habitual ego as our real self. …But this is mere brain function and not our most proper self, … which, if the [ego] perishes in death, remains intact.”

Hinduism:

The Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, describes man in the following way:

“Twofold is the nature of all beings; partly divine, partly inferior.” (XVI,6);

moreover, the Gita has God Krishna say about Himself:

“I am the God, the eternal Self,

which indwells every being. … (X,20)

Islam: the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi wrote in the 13th century:

“Know: Human creaturehood consists of spirit soul (ruch) … and drive soul (nafs) …”

Christianity:

In the spiritual view of Christianity, John has the Nazarene say the following:

“But the Father who dwells in me does the works.”

In the 17th century, the Silesian mystic Angelus Silesius writes:

„Two men are in me:

One wants what God wants,

the other, what the world,

the devil and death want.” (Cherubine Wanderer V, 120)

The vernacular:

It speaks crudely but accurately of the “inner swine” as the counterpart to the “conscience” with its typical admonitions, the “bites of conscience.”

Jewish Wisdom:

In the story of creation, the (apparent) duality of man is symbolically expressed by the two elements from which man was created, on the one hand from the material “earth dumpling”, on the other from the “breath of God”, the immaterial spiritual dimension.

But what is the nature of these two “creatures?” On the one hand, there is meant the ego program in man, the instinct of self-preservation, whose purpose is to seek only his own good, at the expense of others. On the other hand there is the “soul”, (in spiritual literature mostly called “spirit”, the “father in me”, the intuition, the inner voice, the gut feeling, the conscience). It is the love program, the (in)born Son of God who “seeks his good in the good of others.” Can it be expressed more aptly than Goethe, who lets Faust say:

“Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast:

The one holds on to the world with clinging

clings to the world with clinging organs;

the other lifts itself forcibly from the * dust

To the realms of high ancestors.” (Faust I. Before the Gate.)

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* Nullity (of dust)

All these statements show what everyone knows and no one knows, that the clever teaching of Christianity that Jesus is the sole possessor of the “Father in me” is absurd. However, it is easy to maintain this means of power for the corresponding cult of personality because the awareness of likeness is not so easy to work out. And such efforts have been thoroughly exorcized by the churches since the Middle Ages. Or, even more persistently, they have hushed up such statements of the Gospel as “You are all gods!”.

Jesus, however, emphasized the likeness (Gen. 1:27), i.e. the filiation of all people: “You will do even greater things than I”. (The OT wanted – as the churches still do today – that God up there solves the problems (“Lord, make haste to help me!”; Ps. 70), but Christian wisdom wants it to be us “ourselves”, i.e. our inner spiritual identity, the Son of God, the inner voice, the gut feeling. It wants us to “look within” and consciously use our ability to open the floodgates in order to release our spiritual powers. Many people know the function of intuition, but they are more aware of its limitations than of the almost incomprehensible possibilities that are opened up through dialog with the inner voice when we know what to do, when we (can) follow the guidance that says: “Thy will be done!”

(translation with software)