All that fuss over finding 'self'

There is something lurking at the root of everything that we do. Finding the ‘self’. It isn’t an inherently self-centred goal rather an unselfish process in itself.

“We enter this life open and full of love, akin to an empty vessel receptive to all the good. But guess what? Overtime, we exude this defensive façade and have an inability to be spontaneous,” says Patrick Wanis, a human behaviour expert.

The ‘self’ is like a platonic idea existing in a mystic realm beyond time and space. It’s more a style of being. We don’t come with ready-made selves. We have to create them. It doesn’t happen in the happy accident of passivity, but it is a product of several actions, which are performed not ‘away from it all’ but ‘in the face of it all’.

The attitudes and atmosphere we grow up in have a heavy hand on how we see our adult ‘self’.

The hurdles

As Dr Robert Firestone, author of The Self Under Siege, writes, “As children, people not only identify with the defences of their parents, but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them. These destructive personal attacks become part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable from the self-system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true personality of the individual.”

The ‘self’ is prone to transform and become its own antithesis. This is an ongoing discovery. What lacks in the search for the ‘self’ is consistency in the way you look at yourself. Psychologist William James says that we get caught up in a whole lot of social selves, which we portray to the public, thinking that is the real us. It is quite disarming to know you would be treated like an adult, when you face the world as you grow up. Mollycoddling at home
kind of entraps in your emotional comfort zone.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert observes in a wise and witty manner, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary, as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.”

Let’s take a look at how the ‘self’ expands:

Definition

Take a survey of your life keeping these questions in mind — Who are you? What do you value the most? What do you have to offer in this lifetime? What have you loved the most so far? What has uplifted your soul? What has dominated and delighted you at the same time?

Affirmation

The statement, “I walk a lonely road in the boulevard of broken dreams”, might sound melancholic, but it is a realistic way to take life head on. Like Nietzsche says, “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk.”

Revision

We have to break down boundaries that don’t serve any purpose in our lives. Ditch the parts that don’t reflect who we really are. As mindfulness expert, Dr Donna Rockwell points out, to generate a “state of upliftedness that makes everything else possible, which creates the ‘go for it!’ spirit we crave, is to subdue the doubting mind by disarming negative thoughts.”

Growth

A day might come when you realise that your idea of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that you play or are been conned to play. You recognise your personal power, but are open and vulnerable to your experiences. Now that’s really progressive. Who said growing involves being narrow-minded?

It’s mundane to witness your social media feed filled with images of friends in faraway countries. It seems as though everyone is desperately looking for the next big adventure, booking tickets on a whim and squandering all hard-earned money on trips around the world; constantly in search of something they feel elusive and hope they’ll find along the way: themselves.

To me, the notion of “finding yourself” is one that implies that we’re all walking around lost. Why do you look for your ‘self’ elsewhere? Isn’t your day-to-day life significant enough to have any actual impact on the person that you are supposed to be?

Anti-climax

Fret not! Daniel Dennett, a cognitive scientist, believes that our conception of a self is an illusion created by the experience of the world. Best elaborated by the analogy of an object’s centre of gravity, which is abstract. Not a concrete thing. But we treat it as something real. So why break our heads over finding something that may not exist?