"Know thyself" was the inscription on the pediment of the temple of Delphi. But who is this "self" that we must know? Is it perhaps the faults, the gifts? No, it is not only these that we have to know. "Knowing ourselves" means that we know the various bodies from which man is composed (the physical, the etheric, the astral, the mental, the causal, the buddhic, and the atmic body), and the needs of these various bodies... If the Mystics of Antiquity insisted so much on the need to know ourselves, it is because this knowledge opens the greatest possibilities for development, progress, success. As long as we do not know the needs of our higher Self, we give everything to the physical body which is overfed, while the soul and the spirit remain hungry and thirsty and suffocate and die. "Know thyself"... All science, all wisdom is there: in knowing ourselves, in rediscovering ourselves, the union of the lower with the higher Self. The symbol of the Mystic who managed to meet himself is the serpent biting its tail (the ouroboros). The serpent represents a straight line, or a broken one, and the line is nevertheless limited. The serpent biting its tail becomes a circle, and the circle is the infinite, the unlimited, it is eternity. The man who managed to realize the symbol of the circle enters a world where there are no more limits, where there is no longer any separation between the above and the below, because all the powers, the riches, and the virtues that the true Self possesses are diffused into the small self. The small and the great are now united and man becomes a deity."