FIND YOUR SELF: Uncover the Divine Within

There are many paths to transformation, yet each has a common thread of resulting in a clear,
quiet, and healthy mind, peace, joy, and happiness, and the experience of total freedom.
Indeed, your mind will be as fresh and crisp as a pure mountain spring, you’ll feel joy like the
birth of a child, and be as free as an eagle soaring through America’s national parks. You’ll race
ahead of humanity and know that you dwell in heaven on earth in this lifetime. You will do what
you will and live your life simply as you are, with great trust and confidence.

Religions call the end of the spiritual path enlightenment, awakening, liberation, nirvana, Self-
realization, or attaining the Kingdom of Heaven. As seekers, our work is to find our true,
authentic Self. While we are to awaken and know truth, each of us needs to grow and change
across a continuum to truly “know” this truth by experience to fulfill our human destiny.

This essay maps a common pathway to finding your true Self. Offered here is an insight-based
approach. Please know that to complete this journey, it could take a few years of focused effort
including journaling, unearthing your mysteries, and releasing your grip on the life you’d built.

The endpoint of human fulfillment is to return to your natural state, as you were before a lifetime
of accumulated ego drama and dilemma. The object of this journey is to shed over time your
human ego, i.e., your limited sense of a separate or personal “self.” Without this limited identity,
in the end you know without a doubt that you’re participating in God’s life, possessing God’s
viewpoint, being God in human flesh. You’re still human and identify as an individual, but your
inner, authentic essence is liberated and unborn awareness, perception, subjectivity, soul, or
spirit. You learn that you have lived with your real Self your whole life.

People will find themselves starting now in different places along their journeys. But everyone
will need to overcome their deficiencies in order to live into their strengths, develop and trust
their clear conscience, resolve their personal psychological challenges, develop their spiritual
qualities and character traits, and grow over time to eventually recognize their own divinity.
Preparation for accomplishing these tasks basically requires an open mind and open heart.

Psychospiritual Development

Watch your sneaky ego. It’s a very clever, self-interested force attracted to the idea of wearing
“enlightenment” as a badge of honor, even though this will ultimately snuff it out. It’s OK to let
your ego help drive your effort, but in the end the ego is pride while your true aim is humility.
Your e.g.o. is “edging God out.” More mildly, the ego is simply your body and mind representing
an individual human self, one that does not believe you are divine.

The ego-self is what you refer to as your human “I.” It’s the ordinary consciousness of most
human beings. It has self-interests and desires of a personal nature. The ego has an identity
separate from everyone else’s identity. It fails to recognize one’s shared divinity with all people.
 Fadden | Find Self | 2

What constitutes the ego is identifying you by occupation, race or ethnicity, education level,
socioeconomic class, personal wealth, nationality, interests, ambitiousness, personal
appearance, possessions, family, individual history and memories, personal beliefs and values,
and just about any label. The ego is the outside layer or front you show the world. Your ego is
always on guard to defend itself. It is what covered over your inner divine Self in the first place — 
taking you to be separate, merely human, unconnected from the divine Everything, and not
already in heaven. It veiled your true inner divine nature.

Personal Reforms

Deep personal reforms are part and parcel to advancing in along your spiritual path. Religious
writers and practitioners from East to West seem to universally agree that much of the journey is
removing the iron grip of your separated self or ego, so you may reach your full human potential.
Realize that you’ve probably mastered much of what follows already.

Gradually overcome these ego issues with soul-searching, reflection, and intentional effort:

 delusion or not seeing the reality before you despite the evidence
 desiring or craving for any object such as people, sports car, shoes, material existence,
etc.
 ill-considered acceptance of social expectations
 racism, ethnocentrism, bigotry, repulsion, or hatred
 the excessive pursuit of money and possessions
 selfishness
 cruelty
 senseless anger
 contentiousness, argumentativeness, and quarreling
 craving for status or wealth, name, and fame
 restlessness towards life
 the tendency to dominate over other
 inaccurate thoughts or perceptions colored by narrow beliefs, opinions, and biases
 negative thinking
 judging others as “good” or “bad”
 making excuses, explaining away your faults, not taking responsibility
 desires or unnecessary wants
 holding expectations rather than accepting reality
 jealousy and envy
 focusing too much on survival and security, being powerful, or winning people’s affection
and esteem
 over-identifying with ethnic, family, religious, cultural, or national group
 neurotic projections and emotional problems that disturb your peace
 not attending to fears, anxiety, and psychological suffering
 Fadden | Find Self | 3

Attachments Come in Different Shapes and Sizes

Identifying our attachments is the first step towards living an unrestricted life of peace and joy.
Attachments are desires for or an aversion to something or someone that create such sticky
emotional clinging that it affects one’s ability to think clearly. With some practice we can become
aware of our dominant attachments and in the process learn how to free ourselves from them.

This list enumerates well-known attachments common to us all:

 Physical: Attachment to one’s body, color, shape, physical fitness, health, sexual desire.
Also included are material things such as money, house, nature, clothes, food, people,
pets, possessions, luxury, etc.
 Mental: Attachment to particular emotions, one’s identity, family name, family status,
family background, class, race, nationality, gender, language, relationships, social
status, power, prestige, fame, habits, hobbies, daily routine, rules, procedures, opinions,
judgments, beliefs, prejudices, etc.
 Spiritual: Attachment to one’s religious leader, religious beliefs, God, saints, religious
tradition, methods of worship, spiritual practices, places of worship, scriptures, ideals,
virtue, morality, spiritual life, afterlife, knowledge, symbols, etc.

From a spiritual perspective there are no “good” or “bad” attachments. All attachments bind us to
ego and stand in the way of our liberation from ego. Eventually we have to surrender all our
attachments.

Ways to a Healthier Mind

The human mind has a way of clouding our clear and honest perception of people and events.
These 10 cognitive distortions are things to watch out for in your everyday life. Try to think more
accurately. Mental wholeness is spiritual holiness after all.

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories.

2. Overgeneralization: You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives.
4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t
count.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence.
6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their
importance.
7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel, such as, “I feel stupid, so I must be
stupid.”
8. “Should” statements: You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,”
“musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos.”
9. Labeling: Instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, “I’m a jerk.”
 Fadden | Find Self | 4

10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame
other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.

Look out also for a few feeling experiences because they will affect your perception:

 Sadness/depression
 Guilt/shame
 Anger/irritation/annoyance/resentment
 Frustration
 Anxiety/worry/fear/nervousness
 Inferiority/inadequacy
 Loneliness
 Hopelessness/discouragement

Here’s how you can approach these feelings: Identify the thought or feeling, examine the
rationale for the thought or feeling, determine the actual persuasiveness of the thought or feeling
you had, choose what’s the more reasonable and likely case, figure out if it’s worth hanging onto
that thought or feeling, then replace it with a new way of thinking or feeling in such situations.

Evolution of Faith

There are many ways of relating to God or your inner divine that deepen over a lifetime. These
are some common progressions in a spiritual journey:

 From fearing God in the emotional sense when you’re young, you will see God more as
a truly loving parent, friend, or mentor.
 You overcome the fundamentalists’ and televangelists’ base appeals of self-interest, give
to God and others without expecting anything in return, and realize that God is not “Big
Daddy” up in the sky or the “Bogeyman” out to get you.
 Life isn’t always black and white. Consider gray areas. Often something creative pops up
when you hold two seemingly conflicting ideas in tension together.
 Stop seeing God as a deeply inaccessible mystery that you cannot encounter alone.
 Make a total commitment to God as a significant other who becomes your inseparable
companion, guide, and support.
 Develop as a mature, spirited, and conscientious adult. Go your own personal, individual
way — even when it might be at cross-purposes to the peer group, religious institution,
family, society, or state to which you belong. Your true Self or inner God will become
your operating center. “To thine own Self be true.” Decide for yourself what religious
teachings you accept or reject. Know that institutional religion is human, not divine, and
may make mistakes.
 Recognize the value of human dignity and appreciate your unique place in the cosmos.
 Give blind trust and obedience only to your inner God, who is the quiet and gentle inner
pulse you touch for advice and support all day long.
 Fadden | Find Self | 5

 Learn to enjoy great freedom of choice in prayer, perhaps making spontaneous,

personalized prayer to your inner God throughout the day — simply talking to God and
listening inwardly to God’s message. Pay attention to this Spirit’s inputs to your mind.
The Spirit “speaks” to you all the time, counseling you on things big (e.g., who to marry)
and small (e.g., what to wear to work today).
 Expand your concerns for the needs of yourself and your family to a wider community
level.
 Contribute your unique gifts and talents to make society more loving, fair, and just.
 Simplify your lifestyle, perhaps living as a minimalist. Live a simple, open, transparent,
plain, shining, bright, sound, reasonable, rational, sane way of life with few possessions.
 Surrender totally to your inner God and concern yourself with service to your fellow
neighbor.
 Establish a correspondence between your external conduct and your authentic, inner
being.
 Enjoy your unity or union, or perhaps even a sense of “marriage,” between you and your
inner God. Sacrifice more and more of your human “self” in loving, self-giving service to
others.
 Finally, be open to major forthcoming changes in your worldview.

Signs of Your Inner Divine

A good check on whether you’ve made progress or grown spiritually is to consider how you are
living and expressing in your daily life what Christians call the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. These
are your godly inner qualities that bleed through your human self or ego.

The fruits of the Spirit are:

 charity (unconditional love)

 mercy (forgiveness)
 joy (happily accepting the present moment as is)
 peace (pervasive contentment)
 meekness (kindness)
 faithfulness (serving God without dwelling on what God or others will return to you)
 gentleness (participation in your inner God’s way of doing things that is gentle and firm)
 goodness (affirming the universe is good, a sense of union with it)
 patience (certain of God’s promises)
 self-control (no longer seek out safety and security, affection and esteem, or power and
status symbols)

The seven gifts of the Spirit are:

1. charity (unconditional love)

 Fadden | Find Self | 6

2. wisdom (gain God’s view of things, a divine perspective on the world and the more universal
reality)
3. counsel (being sensitive to the words and impressions of the delicate divine impulse within)
4. fortitude (strength and energy to overcome major obstacles to spiritual growth, as the journey
is that of long labor pains to birth your inner Self)
5. knowledge (penetrate truths and mysteries of faith, spiritual insights or impressions arise
spontaneously)
6. reverence (not “afraid” of God, i.e., “fear of the Lord,” in the emotional sense, but fear in the
sense of awe, wonder, and reverence)
7. piety (mellows the sense of reverence for God and over-strictness with oneself, great spirit of
kindness and understanding with others, meekness in bearing their faults, willingness to forgive,
and genuine affection for people)

The Transformation

At the end of your spiritual journey, after all the psychological and spiritual growth and changes,
you are freed from the very human self or ego. “Nondual” awareness is your new reality, and
you see through God’s eyes. This is when you realize that you are among the seven billion
unique divinities walking the earth today in particular human minds, bodies, and societies. The
“inner God” is your very own unlimited and untouchable awareness, subjectivity, or that which
perceives or sees. This is true of everyone, but the ego-self gets twisted in with your divine self
over time. You lose the limited views and mental dramas of your outdated ego, and you achieve
your human potential as a divinity. You are your inner Self, or God. This is the final outcome of
your spiritual quest.

In the coming days and weeks, you will notice that you’re coming to view everything from a
universal perspective. With nondual awareness, your universal perception becomes perfect,
clear, and honest. You know your awareness is you, the divine. Your everyday consciousness,
clear perception, subjectivity, pure character, or soul is this awareness. It’s what’s awake. God
is no longer an object of your mind, but pure “subject” (you). You are divine spirit having a
human experience. You are that awareness noticing the thoughts, emotions, and memories that
show up in your mind stream, but these things are not you.

Then you surrender your obsolete ego-self, which is all the fleeting things that you might have
thought were you. It’s not easy to let go of what you desire. This may be a long grief process. To
identify it all, the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi advises that you ask yourself, “Who am I?”
What’s left if you discard anything that’s not permanent, including what you currently “possess”
like your body, thoughts, memories, and emotions, your role as this or that, who you are relative
to all your relationships, your job, your belongings? This is basically anything you cannot take
with you when your body dies. What do you finally come to? Hint: your forever peaceful, joyful,
and free awareness.

Implications for Your New Life

 Fadden | Find Self | 7

What changes should you expect in your life? You become selfless. Literally, you’ve lost your
human self. Everything you do is for others. You cannot be selfish or self-centered because you
have zero interests of a personal nature. You are unconditionally loving and compassionate.
Your priorities may change as you see your purpose more clearly (basically what you wish to
accomplish for others before your body dies).

Life is quite awesome at the end of your journey. You desire nothing, so you do not suffer. No
stress will worry you or make you anxious. You cannot help but live totally in the present, where
you let go of troubles over past and future. You feel deep peace and joy and abundance. Your
chattery, worried, overactive mind goes silent. Your thoughts are now practical and more or less
for the day at hand. You enjoy happiness, unadulterated freedom, and the everyday thrills of a
clear and healthy mind. You know you have not one thing to lose.

When the dust settles and you’re adapting to your new life, it’ll occur to you that you don’t feel
like your old self. Your divine true self is what’s left now, not your ego. So what has changed?
You keep the uniqueness of your divine character, i.e., what essentially makes you you. You
drop the worries and anxieties, negative emotions, obsessing over the past that haunts you or
the future you fear, your emotional involvement in people’s problems, and any of your personal
willfulness or narrow self-interests. Now in the days and weeks ahead, you adjust to your new
transformed life similar to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.

A Buddhist scripture has a few things to say: “You’ll be infinitely tender, compassionate,
nurturing, enabling, and empowering. You’ll be a quiet, gentle being, utterly without cares or
encumbrances, either mental or physical. You’ll be calm in body and free in mind, steady amidst
the unsteady, happy all the time, not worried about where you go, not attached to anything, not
even to detachment. You’ll be full of love amidst the hostile. You’ll feel at home everywhere. You
will have transcended all boundaries, put aside all ‘for’ and ‘against.’ You’ll be as calm as a pool
unstirred by the wind, pure like the waters of a deep still lake, bright as the moon when freed
from the clouds, clear as the cloudless sky. Some people might think you’re dumb, but you’re
not really so; indeed, you’re as sharp as a razor’s edge.”

The Magnificent Vision

As your journey nears its conclusion, you will have shed all that’s left of your human “self” or
ego. You will have worked through and released all your mental disturbances. Your thinking is
clear. You have let go of your emotional attachments to everything and everyone. In short,
you’ve ended the grieving of your limited human existence. You will have experienced denial
and anger, attempted to bargain to keep your old life, overcome a depression, and finally
accepted that you’re living naturally now as a simple divine being. As it turns out, God is one of
us. Indeed, God is all of us. But we don’t all know it.
 Fadden | Find Self | 8

You know intuitively that you are your inner Self — an essential, necessary, and equal segment
of the vast web that is God or all that exists, part and parcel of the divine. Every human being
and all that exists throughout the cosmos are of one essential substance, even in all the infinite
uniqueness. As gods, we all have God’s qualities.

Your very own simple awareness is now free of all dramas, all interests, all attachments, all
negative thinking and feelings, all beliefs, attitudes, memories, and values, and all desires. This
new person is divine, deep, and limitless. What is more exciting than to learn that you’re an
important member of the Royal Family?

Recommendations for the Journey

 The fastest and most effective route to finishing your journey is to become a radical
giver. Everybody knows someone who just helps others with no questions asked and
expecting nothing in return. Volunteering might be your way. But be a giver all the time in
your everyday life. As the saying goes, “It’s better to give than to receive.” With this you’ll
give yourself away.
 Surrender to the grace or direction in your life and grieve the end of your old ways. Your
ego-self will not be in charge anymore and will go down kicking. In time you will notice
that your life is already headed in a particular direction. Don’t resist it. You are at one
with the cosmos, and it will take very good care of you. It seems the very last lesson to
learn is letting go of your grip on controlling your destiny. You’re in the flow.
 Divine therapy is a method that helps you to be more and more sensitive to your Spirit
within, but this can only happen when some baggage is moved out. Our unconscious
contains all the emotional trauma of a lifetime (that we have repressed) as well as
enormous levels of energy and creativity. Throughout your journey, all undigested
emotional material must be removed in order for the free flow of grace and the natural
and spiritual energies in the unconscious to manifest themselves. When you’re in a quiet
mind state, simply notice, acknowledge, and let yourself feel each disturbing thought or
emotion that arises, then gently say goodbye to each of them as they pass out of your
awareness.
 Much of the journey is giving things up. This can be hard because we grow attached to
people, places, and things. You’ll need to stop clinging to these parts of your life. Almost
lockstep, when you give up a grudge, a stubborn feeling, or a strong belief, and so on,
you’ll feel lighter and be given a spiritual insight. In giving away your ego, you’re
preparing for a liberated new life.
 Highly recommended spiritual practices are: 1-journaling to notice the divine in your day
and in yourself, solve personal problems, or ponder deep questions, 2-focused
psychotherapy where you finally resolve lingering and difficult emotional issues about
your past or future that intrude in your life and distract you from a healthy mind, and/or 3-
practicing on a regular basis a meditation that stills your mind to become more familiar
with your inner divine in this quiet mindlessness. Eventually you’ll live from this place all
the time.
 Fadden | Find Self | 9

 Test out your experiences and insights in the ordinary affairs of life. You will discover
that your new values and priorities start to run counter to that of the mainstream culture.
Know that common sense and practicality match up with spiritual truths.
 Be open to and trust the new flow of insights. They’ll trickle in at first, but will arrive more
often nearing the end of your journey. You’ll gain knowledge of people and the world,
and the wisdom of the divine.
 Take good care of yourself and your life. Don’t drop the ball on your health, family,
friends, work, bills, chores, etc.

In Conclusion

This journey takes commitment, focus, and regular effort to grow and transform. It takes grace to
carry you forward to complete your journey. All boils down to this trifecta: 1-lick your wounds
and heal from the psychological damage that life has thrown your way and that separates you
from your inner divine, 2-grow up into your full stature as a mature, responsible, and spirited
adult human being, and 3-find your Self or come to know and accept the reality of who you are
as pure Spirit. This leads to great happiness.

Written by Thomas Fadden. Dedicated to the Rev. Tom Bigelow, my spiritual friend.

Further Study

For further reading, study the works of Christian, Sufi (Islam), and Kabbalah (Judaism) mystics,
as well as enlightenment of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta’s no-self,
and Hinduism’s Self-realization. In particular, I recommend Jim Marion’s Putting on the Mind of
Christ, Ramana Maharshi’s Who Am I? and Nisargadatta Maharaj’s I Am That.

***Available at medium.com/avatour, academia.edu, and in the Kindle Store at amazon.com.