When it comes to the life of Bruce Lee most people realize he was a famous martial artist as well as a famous movie star who died long before his time.
But, there was much more to the man than most people realize. And, no, this does not mean they were any strange conspiracies surrounding his passing. (Such nonsense was promoted through B grade films such as BRUCE LEE: HIS LAST DAYS, HIS LAST NIGHTS or BRUCE LEE: WE MISS YOU)
Really, the most amazing thing about Bruce Lee was his philosophical approach to life. What many people did not know was the fact that Lee held a BA Degree in Philosophy and was a very well read man and a deep thinker.
Lee wrote many philosophical musings that were published posthumously in a series of edited collections of his thoughts.
Now, Lee’s body of work was quite diverse and covered a host of topics but one of the most interesting concepts he addressed was the notion that “All knowledge is ultimately self knowledge.”
That is to say, Lee believed that an individual was forever learning and improving with everything one did.
For Lee, he used martial arts as an example but you could substitute and active or intellectual pursuit into this notion. That is, because no matter what we do we learn a little bit more about ourselves through our actions.
This could be a realization of our likes or dislikes, our positive attributes vs. our negative ones, etc.
From this we understand those aspects of our life that are our positive attributes and what areas of our life could use a little improvement. Of course, this can all be a conduit to self improvement and that is obviously a good thing.
Often, when we look for means of self improvement from “magical” sources and there is nothing magical to self improvement.
Self improvement is often found in everyday life and this is what Bruce Lee was stressing.
While it may seem somewhat odd to assume that a minor hobby can create a conduit to self improvement the fact remains that there is nothing odd to this notion!
Yes, often, the miraculous exists in the ordinary and when it comes to self improvement there really is it is often the ordinary actions we take that provide us much insight to self improvement.
This simple concept was a brilliant observation by Lee that remains as relevant today as it did when Lee first pondered it 4 decades ago.
1 thought on “Bruce Lee: All Knowledge is Ultimately Self Knowledge”
What Bruce actually meant by saying, “All knowledge is ultimately self knowledge.” goes so much deeper than this article. Bruce Lee was very intelligent, and may not have identified as a Taoist, but by my observation I’d assume he was Taoist. The reason that all knowledge is self knowledge is because we are all one person, the mind of God, Tao, living within all things, we are not separate entities, only one who forgot we were whole. Everything we learn is working back toward this ultimate truth, to truly know oneself is to truly know God, or Tao. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. It is like a finger pointing the way to the moon, don’t focus on the finger, or you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.