(Image & Source: The School of Athens @ Aleteia)

…Man is a slave of the society that he created by himself. And as he passes through the desert of his materialist-oriented life, his life is increasingly transformed into a monotonous program of a vicious android robot. To change such a destructive course of his existence, he must turn himself and recognize his essence and role in this life, in this dimension.

The key to leaving this self-produced slavery is self-knowledge. Man must become his own teacher and not rely too much on other people and their sometimes malicious provocations and (non)deliberate intrusions.

But how does a person achieve self-knowledge, that is to learn in its own way; without interfering with the various false teachers of suspicious intellectual backgrounds, whose aim is not to teach their students to think with their own head but to adapt to their imposed instructions and the often distorted norms of our everyday society.

In order for a single self-aware individual to choose the right way, several preconditions must be met:

* a certain degree of intelligence (a non-intelligent being will struggle to overcome all the obstacles on his path)

* high doses of creativity (without the ability to imagine and create ideas, man is just a simple machine with a brain)

* a positive and constructive spirit (if a man is not looking in the world in a positive way, he will never achieve the ultimate knowledge, no matter how high a degree of intelligence and creativity he possess)

* basic knowledge (if one does not know how to read, write or count as to verify the truth of hypotheses and theories from various media sources used in his research)

When a man is armed with all the necessary positive virtues, then he can freely climb the stairs of self-knowledge. But the question is how to choose the right path. Namely, there are many correct and even more incorrect paths. All of them lead to one goal, but the time to reach goals is different. Each initiator (beginner pursuing higher goals) basically wants to reach the goal of his own life path as soon as possible. And despite the fact that each time it is difficult and time consuming (there is no instant success) there are some shortcuts that can ease the choices that each initiator has to make when he finds himself at the intersection of its predetermined path.

The best and safest way is to seek the advice of true teachers (those who have already passed that path), those who will not impose their will on their students and talk to them or show them what is right and what is not. Their help consists of counselling rather than instructions; and as counsellors there are to direct students to their own intended direction. The counsellor advises and does not impose his own rules. That is why I think every student is also his own teacher.