Why Should We Know Ourselves?

Hello, everyone. We're together this evening with episode 6 of Circle Talks. We'll talk about knowing yourself; it's a really deep topic. Our first question: why should we know ourselves? What does knowing ourselves give us, what do we gain from it? Let's go two rounds on this.

Knowing ourselves is essentially knowing the source of the problems we face in life. Because what we call ourselves is the desire to receive pleasure, an egoistic desire to receive pleasure. That's our nature, everyone's nature is like this, and problems won't be solved without realizing it.

Yes, selfishness: wanting everything for myself. They say "the big fish eats the little fish"; I constantly want to eat everything, the whole world, to get the most pleasure I can and die. Our nature is such that I want this even knowing I'll die. Think of drug addicts, or a smoker: the doctor says "you have to quit now, or you'll die," and they can't quit. There's something in our nature that's willing to die for a momentary pleasure. That's why knowing ourselves isn't actually something romantic. It sounds that way, "know yourself"; in spiritual methods it's usually told romantically. But it's actually more of a negative thing. Unfortunately our nature isn't good, it's selfish; we need to think about what we can do. Otherwise, if we go on autopilot, we become like an animal being tossed about: good things keep happening in my life, bad things happen, everything is instinctive and I can't make sense of what's happening. That's why we need to think seriously.

Once I know myself, I can look for the cure for this. The cure is building good relationships, good bonds and good communication with others. And this can be done in an environment suited to it. Because when everyone is an egoistic desire to receive, when everyone is on autopilot, how do people act? Run from pain, run toward pleasure. Whoever eats whom. That's the situation. That's why knowing ourselves is very important; to come off autopilot a bit, out of instinctive behavior, and be able to think. Otherwise what happens? Always instinctively do this, do that; I always think afterwards. Something happens to me and only then do I think "why did this happen?" Why don't you think about the action beforehand? There's such a thing as learning to think, and that's what we need as a society. Not just jumping into something because I enjoy it; if I don't weigh "Is this necessary, does it harm someone else?" before acting, society won't be a society.

Yes, we also mix up concepts a bit. As with knowing yourself, we mix up the concept of freedom. We think freedom is doing whatever I feel like; if I can do what I feel like, I feel free. But if I truly know myself, I start to realize that freedom has nothing to do with this; on the contrary, as long as I do what I feel like, I'm a slave to my own nature. I see that I can gain real freedom only if I know myself and can act independently of myself. And the way to that is, again, to know and recognize yourself.

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Let's move on to our next question, my friends: what is human nature? What is the essence, the substance of our nature?

Human nature is egoistic, that is, a desire to receive pleasure only for itself. In other words, its hardware is the desire to receive and its software is egoism; every hour of the day it wants to receive for itself. If we live with this nature, we can't be happy. The world goes from chaos to chaos, from bad to worse, from darkness to deeper darkness; and it has to. This desire to receive pleasure grows coarser and more unruly by the day. A good education in an environment suited to it is needed. If we don't get an education, life becomes what it is now: the politician doesn't know what he's doing, the teacher doesn't know, the student doesn't know, the parent doesn't know at all. They don't understand their spouse, they don't understand their child, and because of this meaninglessness there's extra pain. Because there's suffering, there's pain, and on top of that one can't make sense of it. But we see it in sports: if the pain I endure has a meaning, it may even be a pleasure for me. The pain itself isn't pleasure, but its result is. I go to the gym, lift weights; at that moment my body hurts, but I know something good will come of it. So my mind changes; that pain is no longer unbearable but a necessity. I understand, and I don't suffer from meaninglessness. Not knowing why you're suffering is a much greater pain. Unfortunately, because of our lack of education we don't even know why we're suffering. If we knew, it would be like doing sports: I have a goal, and the pain I endure for it isn't really that painful, because the result is good. That's why we need to learn. Education is the beginning and the end of everything.

Yes. If we know our nature, we'll also discover as a society how we can live in harmony with it. I think that this way fewer bad things will happen to us. Because if we know our nature and live in harmony with nature, nature won't bring more evil upon us out of nowhere. We need to realize that all of this happens because we're out of harmony with nature; and for that we need to know our nature. If we know our nature, we'll understand where the problem comes from.

And the problem actually isn't so much suffering as not knowing where the suffering comes from; that's a greater pain. All the pain in the world, in life, comes from our own nature, from human nature. And human nature is the egoistic desire to receive pleasure for itself, running on autopilot every hour of the day. Its software is egoism, its hardware the desire to receive. Even when I raise my hand and scratch somewhere, I do it to receive more pleasure.

Yes. After understanding this, what happens? I can make sense of my own actions and others' actions. After that I need to decide what I want in life: what is real happiness? Because if I've done everything until today to be happy, what's the result? Am I happy? If we're young, we're young; if not, we're old; what have I done in life for fifty years? My life has been twenty-five years so far, and I think about what I've done in these twenty-five years to be happy. Being successful? No. Being rich? Our financial situation is good; that's not it either. When there's no money it seems to make you happy; when there is, you understand that real happiness isn't this. When you don't have something, everything seems as if it will make you happy; if I don't have my favorite food, it seems I'll be happy when I eat it. But if I eat that food every day, that's it, it has no taste left. If I could reach everything I wanted the moment I wanted it, I'd fall into depression; there's no other explanation. That's why we need to think: if we live with a nature that wants to be happy egoistically, that says "only me," that always takes the bigger share for itself, will we be able to be happy? What I've seen in my short life, though of course everyone has their own experience, is that material things won't truly give us peace. What will make us happy isn't this; our nature isn't this. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can design our education accordingly; first our own education, then outward toward our surroundings.

Yes. If we look carefully, we'll notice how quickly we consume everything; whatever we want, whatever we obtain, it has no meaning or value left. Our hands are always at zero, always empty, and we can't sustain that happiness in any way. We need to understand this; and for that we need to understand our nature and become truly convinced that we can't be happy this way. A little examination is enough. I think we're all aware of it, because we're constantly chasing something else: buying a nice car, then a nicer car, then something else. It doesn't end; there's no end to it. If we examined our lives a bit and looked at what we chase, we'd see that we really can't be happy. We just need a little examination, a little awareness.

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Our third question is about how to gain this awareness: should a person's focus be outward or inward? Will we gain this awareness and self-knowledge through inward-looking practices like meditation, or through outward-looking actions, in our relationships with people?

Of course, when the time comes a person should also turn inward. But a person comes to know themselves in other people. I can measure and know myself when I relate to other people. The person someone thinks they are when alone is a very imaginary person; what they really are shows in how they approach other people. I don't think meditative things are very harmful. But do we as young people need to sit down and calm down, or can we even calm down? That's what we need to ask. Things like meditation are good for spending one's life calmly; but we're Turks, we're in Türkiye, and we're not very calm. So I'm not sure it works for us. So far I haven't met a young person who says "I'm depressed, let me do some meditation." Young people are more in a void; they don't know exactly what to do in life, and they're searching for the truth more than for things that will soothe them: "What do I really need to do here, what is my job? We were born, it's a strange world, we go on strangely. I didn't choose; I was born into such a family, grew up, for better or worse, in such an environment." Young people are more concerned with these things. And adults mostly don't understand us either, because they don't feel our dissatisfaction; they're not in as big a void as we are. I hear it a lot from my teachers: "When I was your age I was always on the go, why are you like this?" they complain about laziness. But your life isn't satisfying to me. When I become a professor after working for ten years, I still won't know why my life exists. You don't know either, but you've gotten used to it; you've closed that void somehow, become a professor, you have a life. For young people this mostly isn't satisfying anymore, and it will be less and less so. We're really heading toward an inner void, and the remedy is working on and thinking about what kind of person we'll become. Meditation, calming practices and worship are nice; but whether they still satisfy is an open question.

Yes. Meditation or not, we definitely need inner analysis: to analyze ourselves, examine ourselves, turn inward. But this alone isn't enough, because I can only know myself in an environment where I'm with someone else; that's where I can discover new things about myself. Otherwise, if I sat at home from morning to night examining myself, I might not even notice my egoistic nature. Because it needs an opposite; I can't look at it with an outside eye, evaluate it objectively. To analyze it better I need its opposite; and for me that's others, that is, society. Of course I can turn inward and analyze myself in how I approach others; but I need to do this analysis within society, in my relationships with other people.

So a person should always turn inward and do inner analysis; on the other hand, they shouldn't separate themselves from society. Because what we are comes out in our relationships with other people. It's the same in society: a person who joins society finds their profession; because they connect with society, what they'll do, how they'll earn money, how they'll serve society becomes clear. If they withdrew into themselves alone, what they'd do wouldn't become clear. What a person is comes out only in their relationships with others. Marriage is the same: every hour of the day it's as if there's a mirror in front of you.

Yes, all of these are a necessity. People want people, because our biology is like that. But on the other hand we also have a side that doesn't want it: we have a side that wants to be alone, that constantly says "me, me" to others, and these two sides don't fit together. We see that robots quite similar to humans have started appearing in China, and in the future there'll probably be even more. On one hand we don't want people; our nature wants to be alone, more individual, to live saying "it's my life, whatever I want happens." On the other, this freedom isolates us. We're becoming so lonely that we've started producing humanoid robots tailored to the person, acting like a partner or a friend. And a person says: why all this effort, people themselves already exist. Because we feel these two opposite poles, we're depressed. On social media many content creators and streamers complain about loneliness. So loneliness really is a disease; evolutionarily our biology is like that. And the freedom we think we have is actually a prison. The mindset "Let me be individual; if I want something right now, let me order food immediately, go out and wander, not answer to anyone" isn't freedom; it's a prison that limits us, that constantly pulls us into our own shell. For real freedom I need others, I need to be together with others. This is necessary for both our psychological and our biological health; humans need humans. At some point we'll drop the artificial things and feel that this is our real need. Then the question will come: how will we connect in a positive way? Instead of constantly "me, me," how will we build a shared life, a shared system? I'm not talking about utopian things like building a society or a nation; I'm talking about a group of friends. If I have a group of friends and I'm happy there, I'm happy. Say I'm in a society that's very troubled financially, but my group of friends is very enjoyable; everyone truly respects and loves each other. I'd be very little affected by that poverty, that gloom. That's why as young people we need to build such a structure.

Yes, through this structure we can gain real freedom. Because we'll know ourselves, understand what our nature is, and see whether we can build something on top of it. Otherwise we either constantly blame things or want to destroy evil, tear it out of the world; we can't do that, we don't have such an ability. But we can build something on top of it, and we can do this all together. As a society we need to decide, "This is the situation; now we'll build something new on top of it together, connect among ourselves at a new level and build a new life," and make it happen in the bond between us. And only this way can we know ourselves.

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We went two rounds on this question too. Before we close, let's each share an impression briefly.

In making these Circle Talks, our first aim is to be a light to our people, to our country; to show by example that "you can talk like this too," and to seek solutions to the problems among us. If I had to share an impression in one sentence, it would be this: all the problems in the world arise from the broken relationship between people. And my second sentence: our entire source of happiness depends on fixing the relationship, the communication, the bond between people. It's that simple. Like the bond a Turkic tribe of our ancestors built around a campfire. That's actually where people become happy; not in luxury or anything else. However individualized we become in today's world and however much we think this is freedom, this is what we're doing, and we're happy. As Genç Pusula we do this not instinctively but understanding that it really is a necessity, trying to fix things among ourselves. We're in these broadcasts to do our best for our society and for young people, and we feel this: whatever background, whatever faith, whatever language we come from, we're people of this land and we're close to one another. Secular, religious, Alevi, this or that; young people no longer have a perception for these divisions. As the young people of these lands we really are close; our trouble is one, our nature is one. That's why we can get along. What we need to do is truly get along well and be good friends. As we keep saying, even though we have a nature that goes against this, we'll see how happy we are when we do what we need to do. The more we see that the life that truly suits our nature is one lived together, aimed at sharing, centered not on "me" but on "us," the happier we'll be. That's why I hope that as young people we'll build a tighter bond and become more conscious. Because there's no one to change society but society itself; neither the rich nor politicians will change us. What will make life, and Türkiye, better are human relationships and us young people. With the steps we take toward the foundations of Atatürk and the Republic, we'll become the young people behind Mustafa Kemal's words "I have left this country to the youth," and so we'll come together. As you know, Atatürk's concept of "Turk" isn't an ethnic group; it's about uniting everyone on these lands. That man's life was spent for unity; he always fought to unite, because development starts there. The intellectuals of the Republic at that time examined how Finland transformed from a village-like country into one of the most prosperous countries in the world and saw that everything depends on cooperation. Can a society where the merchant and the politician think "I'll exploit him, I'll exploit this one" be a prosperous society? When we think about it a little, we can see how foolish this is. That's why we can build good relationships among ourselves and truly form the youth Atatürk wanted. I thank my friends in the circle and our friends working behind the scenes at Genç Pusula for all their efforts; they're all really very good people. I'm glad you exist.

Yes, being a nation, truly being a family, is possible only this way. We've all gone through many things; we see it in our country too. By nature people want to be inside a community. But not everyone has the same intention, the same approach, and people somehow get drawn into nonsensical things; we all know the results, no need to repeat them here. Truly being a family, truly being a nation, is possible through what we're talking about. And we make these broadcasts together not so much to market this as to be able to live it among ourselves; to be truly a family, a real group of friends, to understand each other, support each other and know ourselves. I hope we can give something from here to young people in our country, maybe in the world. Thank you all for watching and taking part. See you next week, take care of yourselves.

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