Becoming your true Self

Spiritual leaders from the Buddha to St Francis embraced a focus on the development of their internal self by among other things, shedding their attachment to all things visible and external. In this article, I attempt to explore whether this approach still holds value in today's 'modern' world, and how it could perhaps even help us to become the person we aspire to be.

A few days ago, I read a great piece in the Atlantic Monthly magazine on the ongoing turmoil within the Evangelical Church in the United States.

The article laid bare how, especially since the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene and the closure of churches resulting from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Evangelical Pastors have had to wrestle with whether or not to explicitly take a stand on the increasingly political preoccupations animating many of their congregants.

Indeed, all across America, Church leaders have to face the question of whether to focus on earthly, material issues dominating the day to day news headlines such as the politics of vaccine mandates or even whom a Pastor will support in the next election. However, doing so the author writes, may very well end up detracting preachers from their core mission of guiding their followers towards Christianity’s promise of eternal salvation and away from humanity’s fleeting concerns.

The author, who himself grew up in Evangelical circles, his own father having been a Pastor, quoted scripture from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians to illustrate this point: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

This made me think of how many spiritual leaders spanning different faiths heeded those words and chose to shed their attachment to the material, visible things on their own journey towards spiritual enlightenment. The example of St Francis who was born the son of a wealthy cloth merchant who went on to renounce his comfortable station in life to end up embracing a life of poverty in service to others.

Prince Siddharta went through a similar evolution before becoming the Buddha. Indeed, living in extreme luxury in his early years, he too decided to abandon his sheltered life after encountering human suffering the very first time he ever left his royal palace, to embark on his own spiritual path.

A depiction of Prince Siddhartha's four sights on his journey renouncing the world and leading him to become the Buddha: a man bent with old age, a person afflicted with sickness, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am myself far too attached to the many comforts modern life have been able to provide us in the way of technology, healthcare and entertainment to ever call on anyone to renounce them.

That said, what I do believe to be of interest, regardless of whether or not you adhere to any given religious and/or spiritual denomination, is to from time to time ask yourself the following:

Imagine if all the external, visible things that have come to define who you are to yourself and to the outside world were to be suddenly taken away. If you lost everything including your job, societal status, money, would you still be at peace with yourself when looking in the mirror?

That is exactly the question former Wall Street Golden Boy Chip Skowron was forced to confront after being sentenced to prison for committing securities fraud. In an article, he relays how, before his sentencing, he was “in love with himself” for the tremendous financial success that his career had brought him so far. That material success earned him the esteem of the snobbish Greenwich Connecticut East Coast establishment he yearned to be a part of, having himself grown up in less comfortable circumstances.

While in prison, he was surprised by the extent to which he was growing attached to the sense of community and camaraderie that existed between inmates, which felt to him far more authentic, real and vulnerable than the ‘deep’ friendships he thought he’d built up with his equally financially accomplished peers in Greenwich. So much so that upon his release, he missed that part of his prison life so much, that he established a discussion group where inmates can share their reflections with each other in a non-judgmental environment at a prison near his home, which he attends and leads at least once a week to this day.

Chip Skowron, addressing a conference a few years ago.

After being stripped of his status from one day to the next, Chip Skowron went from being a person in love with himself and the money he was earning, to someone on a quest for meaning and belonging. Not unlike in other spiritual journeys, he found his way by surrendering to something greater than himself in the form of the friendships he made while facing the greatest challenge of his life. You can read his full story in the link here.

If I were to apply this lesson and attempt myself not be distracted by the external trappings that seemingly define us, I would begin, having been born with a physical disability, by trying not to view and judge myself as the person in a wheelchair, defined by that which makes me externally different, but simply as a person who just like everyone else has to deal the best he can with the cards life has dealt me. This is of course easier said than done in a society that often prizes conformity, but coming to this realization and making the effort to consider myself in that way, has definitely brought me closer to my authentic self.

Is there a proven way to help us shift our focus from what is visible and fleeting towards developing our internal selves? While there is of course not one conclusive answer to this question, I was paradoxically inspired by advice Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, gave to students on how to be successful in life.

In a nutshell, he asked the students to look around the classroom and guess for themselves who among their peers would be successful and to identify the qualities they have as a person in the way of their values and character traits. Then, once identified, the challenge is to try to ingrain the very qualities you deem important in the person you admire within yourself through repeated habits and action. Here is the excerpt of his speech.

There is something valuable I think in drawing from and emulating each other's qualities to further develop ourselves. Therein lies perhaps an important lesson: Becoming our ‘best’, most fulfilled self is not something we can possibly accomplish on our own. On the contrary, it is through the bounds we make and the lessons we learn from each other that we develop our internal Self.