The path to enlightenment is a lifelong journey of self-reflection and learning from the past to move forward.
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I am not a religious person. I am not a Christian or a Buddhist or a member of any other faith, but I use words like God or Buddha because I believe there are some things we cannot explain, designs we cannot fathom, wonders like infinite intelligence. Moreover, I am a cultural polyglot, born and raised in Asia, naturalized as a US citizen in my thirties, and I conduct business all over the world.
As a result, I am inclined to find bits of wisdom from a variety of perspectives, including drawing on different religious traditions and books and philosophies from every culture. For example, I have come to see wisdom in the Buddhist sense, as a realization or awareness of the true nature of reality that transcends ordinary comprehension. Simplified, wisdom is knowing things as they are. An extension of such thinking is to see wisdom as understanding externalities.
Gaining wisdom is important. But I still see it as a steppingstone towards something greater that requires examination of internalities: enlightenment. Put in terms of human interactions, knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment. Let me explain.
I spent decades attempting to understand others. And while in most traditional terms others would look at my professional career working in the C-suite of international companies and label me a success, I know that I did not move up the ladder as far or as fast as I could have. I work hard, am tenacious, and have strong native intelligence; however, I used to be terrible at “reading” people and the organizational cultures they created. I didn’t know when or how to advocate for myself effectively. I speak four languages, but I often struggled to understand nuance and to make myself clear. I didn’t get all the references or the inside jokes.
More meaningfully, I had grown up in a culture where we are taught always to think of the collective—the organization, the team, the group—first, yet I was working in an American culture that values individual achievements and independence. I was a fast learner in math and engineering but was slow in mastering interpersonal skills and recognizing organizational politics. As a result, it took me a long time to develop the wisdom of “knowing others.” I got there but not without many painful lessons, sacrifice, and defeats that felt, at the time, insurmountable. Developing the ability to understand others—their motivations, agendas, and doubts—required purposeful study and application, just like any other sort of learning.
Knowing Others to Knowing the Self
Now, in my sixties, I have arrived at peace with myself. I’ve taken risks late in life, including becoming an entrepreneur at age fifty-six after decades of corporate roles. Like all of us, should we be lucky enough to live long, I am a product of maturity. I have learned that every season, including winter, has its beauty.
It is, however, important to differentiate simple aging from maturity, for some who age but don’t mature spend their final years reliving the past rather than learning from it. As a species and as individuals, we accumulate knowledge. In my youth, I was obsessed with the future and what I wanted to accomplish. I still care about the future, including having a positive influence on others and on growing my business. I’ve also learned how to reflect on the past in order not to repeat mistakes I made as a future-obsessed younger man. Time has helped me become more philosophical and less reactive.
My maturity has taught me that my ultimate goal is simply to be the best version of myself that I can be. That may be one of the differentiators between wisdom and enlightenment, for with purpose and effort, I have come to know myself. An outgrowth of self-reflection is another aspect of enlightenment—the ability to live not in the past or the future, but to inhabit the moment.
The German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant said that, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” and defined immaturity as the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. He went so far to suggest that such immaturity was a result of laziness and cowardice, saying that it is easy to be immature and allow others to guide you.
In his way, Kant’s view of maturity is not vastly different than the Buddhist sense of enlightenment as an “awakening,” including an awakening to our former lives. I cannot know if I have literally lived former lives, but I have learned how to be reflective about my life and apply the lessons I encounter in such reflection to be the best version of myself in this moment. The result: I make clearer, more informed decisions in my personal and professional life by seeing things as they are, not as others see them or as I wish them to be.