I'm thinking that even saints were not aware enough of their own assumptions and how to balance their many conflicting needs. I wonder if that's not what "wise men" had in mind by keeping their knowledge deliberately obscure. Although I admit that it sounds more as if it is one good justification to keep secrets, period. More likely the secretiveness had to do with "rarifying" the information, so that people appreciated it rather than taking the wisdom for granted. In modern life, this translates to charging a great deal of money for your work so people sit up and pay attention about the value of it. Somehow, this charging lots of money thing turns my stomach and I'm not sure why. So many people taught me Alexander Technique for free, but I guess I paid many times over by talking it up to get them more students and making AT more well known.
It is true that once you open the pandora's box of the awareness of oneself that there is no going back to blissful ignorance. So it is a question of what is better in the longrun. It is often worse in the short run to have gained a little awareness of oneself without any knowledge or example of what to do with the new information.
What I imply when I apologize like this is a little irony about my situation of choosing to be poor and to serve my community. I know this act of apologizing makes me often culturally misunderstood. I know that because I'm entertained by so little in life and I am so resourceful, it means I'm much less motivated to "put off" some sort of reward and work towards something that will hopefully occur some time in the future. I understand that this is directly opposite what most people consider to be reasonable adult life. It's served my happiness quotient very well, but I'm not sure what it's doing for my retirement! I guess I'm going to continue to work and never retire, as I have done all my life. I tell people that, "If I make it to being an old lady, I'm working on being a really nice person so other people want to be around me!"
