I have not updated my blog for over two months now, so I thought that I had better explain why. I fell in love... This is Jinyu, and I feel like the luckiest man on Earth - it is hard to concentrate when your mind is full of a woman like this, and my dark and pensive midnight musings are now basking in the sunlight of a glorious summers day. It also doesn't lend itself to introspection, when a woman like Jinyu loves you... When I said "Onwards and upwards", I really meant it! Laters, and don't do anything I wouldn't...

What is the harder to discern - the motives of ones friends, or the motives of oneself? Of many people it has been said that "they move in mysterious ways". Conversely, that has often been said of me too. So what defines ones movements? It is also said that "a man is judged by his actions". One wonders what a woman is judged by? Whilst it would be churlish of me to answer that question, I fear we live in a churlish world; and I somehow doubt that the other half of the human race are judged just by their actions. However, "actions" is nowhere near as broad a concept as "movements", and we haven't even got onto "mysterious" yet, let alone "motives"...

Motives... Tough one... Most of the time I cannot fathom out my own motives, but on the flip side, I cannot fathom out the motives of my friends either. That may balance things out, but I am not certain. There are at least five thousand years of spiritual teachings on the nature of motives, and they aren't that helpful either. They can tell me what is good, they can tell me what is bad. They can even tell me why they are good or bad. Sometimes the different teachings even agree on which things are good or bad. But they cannot tell me "why" various things motivate me - or for that matter, "why" various other things don't. Besides, I find it worrying that the said five thousand years of spiritual teaching mostly boil down to the same argument: "that it's all her fault" - I fear there is only one slight flaw in this argument: it's wrong. But even that knowledge doesn't help me to discern anyone's motives, let alone my own. It does make me wonder about the motives of the religious teachers, but that doesn't help, as they just join the long list of people who's motives I also don't understand.

Perhaps Plato was right, or maybe Einstein. To take Einstein gloriously out of context, it's all relative. What I see is relative to where I am looking at it from. This seems to bring the onus back round to me, and thus my own motives. Plato believed that that those closest to oneself acted as mirrors, through which one could see oneself, but paradoxically - this is the self "in relation to others", not merely the knowledge of self as an exercise in solipsism. How very Einstein of him... But the common thread here does seem to point to a single theme, which perhaps even sheds some light on the approach to answering the original question too. The oracle at Delphi knew it - after all, it was chiseled into the rock above the entrance: "Gnothi Seauton". Perhaps it is from this that all other knowledge begins; perhaps it is the corner-stone on which everything rests, which would explain the difficulties with the motives of others. Perhaps now is a good time to finally listen to the oracle, to the words that have come down to us through the centuries. Gnothi Seauton: Know thyself...