Happiness super market

I’ve been into the triptych “love-beauty-enlightenment” since I was 18. I’ve tried many methods, among which: the Emin Way, Reiki, SRT, channeling and divinations of sorts. I’ve read tons of New Age books about spirituality, enlightenment, immortality and so on and so on. I boasted that I knew things that others did not, thought of myself as something extraordinary and waited to be adored by all creation in return. Every day I uttered deliberations to bring prosperity, love and happiness my way. I believed in my co-creator powers. Thus, I engaged heavily in meditation and visualizations – and was very sharp, if not downright rude, if someone had the nerve to interrupt my important engagements. I thought I had become enlightened, you see, that in some sense I was in this world but not of it.

There is no safest way to the rosy clouds. When putting yourself in such a situation, you essentially put it at the center of the world. Everything and everybody else just orbits around you as if of secondary importance. In a way, you become your own sun and get blinded, as a consequence. It’s a little bit like holding a lantern. You allow yourself only a very limited view: your body and just a few inches around it. And then you become so absorbed in what you see that you are convinced there is nothing else. In reality, you are holding a lantern in broad daylight, somehow like the Hermit card in the Tarot pack.

I would have stayed in this trance forever, if it weren’t for a series of hard jolts that brought me back to my senses. They actually forced me to lift my head and look around. And what I saw just made me gasp. Life had eluded me all these years. I thought I was living it to the maximum, but what I was really living was a self-delusion. I had even come to the point of lifting my shoulders in apathy when learning about other people’s hardships: they brought it to themselves, I thought. They are paying for old or new sins; they have no idea how things work.

Well, it turned out that neither did I. I thought of life as a big happiness super market and of world as a place of infinite joy and pleasure. I clang to it like babies cling to their feeding bottle, shut reality out and felt free to criticize everyone and everything. Such a fool that I was! Life was passing me by all these years that I spent in meditation, in contemplation of “beauty and love”, in certitude that I was enlightened.

Well, the world holds many things that are plainly ugly. We humans are so imperfect as a species and so predictable that it is almost alarming. But it’s OK. Even if the world is both ugly and beautiful and me imperfect and transparent, it’s OK. I’m still alive. And, at least now, I have the chance to begin to understand humility…