Seeker
For some time my books have posed questions on the meaning of life and on the profound meaning of existence.
These days I live as a hermit (one day I will tell you about my hermitage which is built on a rock spike, surrounded by woods and visited by deer and wild boar) and I pass the time revisiting my past, thinking about the people I have known and the life I have experienced. And I have realized that I have been searching ever since I was little; that I have always questioned the reason for my existence.
Now I am sure: I am a seeker.
If I reflect well though, I have to admit that I often lost myself. At times I believed myself to be a lover, living my affairs with passion and believing each one to be the one. And yet something would always bring me back to the path of the profound search for the reason for my existence.
Other times I lived like an orphan in search of protection and security, but something would always bring me back to the path of the search and creativity, fleeing from the disingenuousness of the people that surrounded me.
At times I was delirious with an unstoppable joie de vivre.
I was a fighter facing his enemies –above all my problems and demons- courageously with an open face. And certainly I was a successful therapist. I taught how to transform the negative into positive and how to make sense of things.
Through it all, I see a continuous search and a flight from deceit and conformity.
This is my list of archetypes, but you reader: search for yours.
Every one of us possesses them.
Everyone loves, suffers, feels joy, but if we don’t have a profound sense of our own existence, then wealth, success or power are nothing. And besides material goods, we can also have a happy family life and go to church but if we don’t know who we are in the depths of ourselves – if we don’t know the why of our existence, then nothing is enough and everything is meaningless.
Senseless.
Even if we live life intensely and passionately and don’t follow our own profound mission –a mission which inhabits every human being- we will feel unsatisfied, empty and meaningless.
In all of my books I spoke of the importance of being sincere with ourselves, of being authentic, of going deeply into our interiority and asking ourselves the fundamental, profound and eternal questions that mark each of us.
Translation by Dani Clark Scano
When the search begins
Each of us has our own personal journey in which we are the absolute protagonist; that is, if we have the courage to look inside ourselves, and take responsibility for the good and evil we find there.
This is not possible if we stay inside ourselves because of fear or because we search for power and success- taking on predestined roles, following the official rules and trying to avoid suffering.
The path to follow goes through body, mind and spirit. It uses our imagination and creativity more than logic and reason. It doesn’t claim to always understand and control everything but rather honors the mystery.
One who follows this path knows she belongs to something greater.
The true search for the profound reason for our being on this earth usually beings when we feel like we are about to die psychologically.
When we are tired of the life we lead, when we feel like we are about to lose everything we struggled for.
When we lose the people we love.
When the people we loved leave us.
When we realize that we got it all wrong.
When we understand that the life we lead doesn’t make sense.
The journey has its beginning in the story of each life, in the places where we have learned to survive, to see black and white, good and evil.
It can be an abandonment, a rejection, a disappointment over failure or a sickness that causes us to fall.
Our journey will continue or it will stop, depending on the way which we live the fall. If we identify ourselves with the fall, we stop there. If on the contrary we live it as an opportunity to understand that we are part of a journey, of something bigger than us, then we will go forward on the journey.
And so the fall is necessary.
Western society is dying because it seeks to avoid the fall; because it doesn’t teach us how to fall.
Translation by Dani Clark Scano
Loading...
