To myself – I. On not having your best wishes coming true

To all my present and future friends.

„Love is the recognition of the formless in the other” (Eckhart Tolle)

(The idea of writing these lines was brought about by the staggering finding that I have never heard a house screamingly mourning on its’ owner's death.)

You have sometimes the feeling of awakening from a bad dream – from your day-by-day, miserable life, with its inevitable highs and lows, with its’ tireless race towards accomplishing your aims and avoiding failures, between your home and your workplace. The ugly dream of your life unfolds extensively between one traffic light and the next one, because you've come to regard yourself as being real, in your car, you consider yourself as one with the impatience that instantly filled your mind. You don’t have anymore space in your own mind since it has been filled up with impatience and anxiety. Instant by instant, day after day, year after year….The remembrance of a flower, of the fir resin scent, of a bubbling brook, the return, by unknown ways, unto you, of a tune, the swift recollection of a face of a person you love – these awake your for an instant, or for two or more, but always too few, from the dream of your life. Not is it only you who go trough such lightning moments, but all the people around. And it’s not even you that who experience them, but the Wholeness we are an integral part with and to whom, by unknown ways, you allowed for a few seconds to reflect itself in you.

Should you look behind and ask yourself what happened inside you on that particular moment, you will surprisingly find out that it purely and simply didn’t happen anything. It’s just the non-happening, just the temporary inability to think of the next traffic light or work meeting – was that which, by vanishing for a bit, made place for you, who are the very stillness that instantly descended to replace the unrest of the mind. You were just seething with rage and your thoughts were running with the speed of light – and that’s what it has come to be like the normal states of mind in the world in which, we all are, more or less, mad. And suddenly, you were at peace. For a short period of time an unnatural stillness fills you up, since you have got not enough mental energy to fuel your inner conflict, the unconscious battle that opposes in your mind the brakes, the throttle pedal, the clutch and the change gear, all of these superimposing the fear of not getting there in time, the thought of an un unfinished quarrel with a colleague or a boss, which was left unfinished yesterday but that you by all means must complete…today. Within that peaceful moment, yet, you simply did not think of anything, the anxiety left you for an instant and you were…you again, since the soul has got again a place of his in the mind and the body. Many a time, these moments are brought about by the remembrance of an immaterial kind of experience of your life (love, the beauty of flowers etc.), therefore don’t turn that lightning into an intellectual labour, do not spoil the beauty of the flower by pressing it within the herbarium! You smelled the fragrance, listened again to the music from your memory without reflecting upon them, because, in the very moment you begin to reflect, that moment of stillness has gone away. You are the music, you are the flower – just their comprehension beyond thought, within a dimension far more intimate and profound of yourself than could the mind to conceive – is what awoke you in those moments.

Music has no business meetings; the flower wasn’t rushing anywhere. And you along with the sound harmony and the scent and all the people on this planet are one with the source whence you were born and to which you will return. If you become able to unburden your mind of all the disharmonies with which you used to torture it so far, the mind shall become a flute through which the Wholeness blows.

You actually dream during the most part of your life: concepts, wishes, fears, goals – they are as real in relation with the lightning moment that I’m now describing for you, as much real is the wave in relation with the ocean. You don’t do anything but incessantly fuelling these thoughts that you are to be afflicted with.

You are clinging all the time to things that come and go, you so extensively got accustomed to regard them as real, vital, essential, you endowed them with qualities which they cannot possess and then ask yourself, time and again (as you grow old), in disgust: when shall I reach the end of this fuss, when shall I find my stillness, when shall I fulfil my objectives and shall be finally happy?

The goals, once attained, will be replaced by other goals and the desires, by other desires, fears – by other fears, because they reside in the very nature of things that come and go, this is the nature of waves – to be born and then vanish away. “Whilst waves collapse unto their graves/Yet waves arise behind” (Mihai Eminescu). Should you miss the aimed target, you’ll feel miserable and in case when it’s to be attained, you’ll be rewarded with just surrogate happiness - just a temporary relief, swiftly replaced by the craving for running again after newer and newer objectives, more and more difficult to attain, as you progressively grow old. You get used to believe that life compels you to fulfil your objectives, to be target oriented, our civilization speaks highly of efficiency, blames failures, exalts speed, progress, development, accumulation – this is a pervert doctrine pertaining to a so-called wellbeing status that leads the nowadays civilization toward its’ self-annihilation.

People around you relentlessly teach you some immutable “truths”. And they also teach you to observe the rules, among which the most important are: building up a social status, becoming a responsible and respectable person, in order to make it. And they sometimes teach you not to observe them. As a pedestrian trying to cross the street, when suddenly the red light appears and from no direction can you see a car approaching, you’ll notice that all the other pedestrians are calmly crossing the street. If you stop and wait the green light, they will involuntarily turn their heads towards you, while walking away, and you’ll be able, at once, to read the “idiot” label in their eyes. Or suppose you manage somehow to play the market or become a successful person by any other way, the crowd will enviously fix their eyes upon you, wishing for them selves to become like you. Maybe now and then you have defied the law, but…you made it.

But I think you are not willing at all for yourself to make it, I’d rather believe that you have struggled so far too hard for things you do not love, but only…wish. This might be the time for a reassessment of the valuable, for an act of courage. The time has come for a transmutation of your consciousness, since the very thing that defines you as a human is, essentially, your self-awareness. All other things are but layers, clothes. This process cannot take place without courageously question the solution of happiness that is represented by the multitude of beliefs with which the community that we used to call “the humankind” has been unconsciously impregnating itself for thousands of years.

We all give to each other many returns of the day and seeing of all our wishes coming true and much happiness, which is not actually a bad thing in itself, for whishing to the other a thing that you consider as being good for him, is going to make better people out of both of you…even though with just a bit.

But should you go deeper in the wording as it is, you are about to see that it contains an essential contradiction: that is, between having your wishes coming true and happiness. Thus have you been taught, alongside your friends: that in order to be happy, you will have to see your wishes realised. You must undertake this pattern to which the world has adhered to; you have to “fall under the regulated category”. And if you assume yourself this very subtle form of brainwashing, you’ll spent the few years that are given to the humans in a lifetime, wishing for yourself to graduate from high school, then go to college, then getting an as much as well-paid job, buying a home, getting married, having children and thereafter, all that you couldn’t manage to accomplish (because, meanwhile, you have begun to grow old), will be unconsciously transferred upon your kids: they will have to get the best grades at school, you’ll send them to the best high-school, the most reputed college and when seeing your ex-colleagues back from college, the friendly rivalry between each other will turn into a competition between the excellences of your children (mine will be a lawyer, mine will become a trader etc.)

You are going to meet with them as if over the same bottle of drink just like back in the college, but, in addition to your somewhat greyish hair and a bit bigger bellies, gradually a new topic is rising in your discussion: everyone will talk about his children, proudly declaring how utterly has he managed to wash their brains and thereby to make them accomplish things that he himself hadn’t the opportunity to accomplish. To make it. That will be an uncanny contest: who has managed, out of you, to transfer to his offspring the largest amount of frustrations, which one has most successfully washed his child’s brains? Or, in case you maybe having, amongst the two-three kids of yours, one who it happens to be just a rascal, some scum, a drunk and a good-for-nothing chap which will deny this indoctrination, the “regimentation” with this scheme which the tradition compels us all to faithfully pursue, the others will give comfort to you, by trying to give a hand just to get this kid into saddle again, they will recommend you to a reputed shrink, or a girl to get married, in order to…fall under the regulated category, as this will keep him balanced, the responsibility will bring him back to earth…

This life-time battle for satisfying all your desires accompanies you, little by little, to the autumn of life, when you meet again with your ex-colleagues back from college, over the same bottle of beer. “The same beer” – that’s obviously just a figure of speech, as many of you will suffer from diabetes, stomach ulcer, arterial hypertension, all acquired and amplified during a life-time struggle to see each one’s wishes coming true, namely yours and your children’s, whom you taught to harbour the same desires as your owns – and your health condition will allow you to drink but a mere tea. But your mind follows the same patterns: what else do we have to do? What do we wish? What are we afraid of? Are there any desires to be satisfied? Hey, guys, I need a walking stick; as to the set of plates, what dentist and what technical expert would you recommend, who can make the plates that best imitate the natural teeth? What? You say you got poli-articular rheumatism? See, I can recommend you to a tough physician, so you’ll be able to run at the Olympic Games in just two months!

Then on the following reunion of the ex-colleagues from college, fewer and fewer: guys, how’s the last resting place market going? Me and my wife can’t afford to be buried among rascals, at Iancu Nou cemetery or Jilava cemeteries, what would our grand-kids say about this?! ..That our grandpas were some rascals.
Roughly, this how are going to be your discussions with your ex-colleagues from college.

Or maybe not. Maybe it is better for you to wake up. Many of these events are inevitable, that’s right, especially the old age diseases. An especially death itself. And for you or for you it’s inevitable to become a manager, to have a career, or to be father to many children, this is the way through which your destiny, the transient part of you, completes itself. But if you perceive them as burdens that become as heavier as the days pass and, at some point, unbearable, this only means that you identified yourself too much with the targeted objective, that you vested in it the quality of the eternal, that it finally coincides with your essence and this unconscious mistake, perpetuated one year after another, will intensify the inner pressures, because the eternity within you won’t let you go unpunished. You will have to set things back again, as the most part of what you have done so far was wrong. You asked to your mind, to your body, more they could handle; now it’s the due time for accepting, with dignity, their limits. Just like your clothes, the body, the mind and thoughts are layers or vehicles. Until now, you have invested such tremendous effort in these clothes, that you diverted them from their functions; you increased their role in prejudice of the spiritual. They need not necessarily be eliminated, but only set back to their right place. The hierarchy dissolution that takes place in the minds of the most people casts many of them into madhouses. You so many times heard people talking about their loan instalments they have with their bank. That’s not true, although people say that they have instalments (mortgages) at the bank, their state of mind should sound like: these instalments have them. Instalments are the master as the acquired thing becomes your owner and you in turn become its’ slave. Not is it you that have a house or a car, but they own you, you are the one who works and suffers and gets insomnia because of them at night. I have never, ever heard in my entire life a home screamingly mourning on its’ owner’s loss. This transfer unconsciously occurs within your mind, not because instalments in themselves might be such a big calamity, but because (and in case when) they become the primordial, the core concern of your life. And this is true for any other objective pertaining to the material world, it’s valid also for your attempts to build up or keep a reputation, to be praised by colleagues, bosses, relatives or friends, to preserve at any costs your beauty and, roughly, your physical appearance. It’s the desire to succeed and the fear of failure – with them both you will have to break up, as they are the bricks in the foundation of your burden.

What is going to happen, otherwise? Maybe everything will be all right to the maximum extent, no inner tension urges you to think like this, on the contrary, the inexhaustible race towards the goals of this world represents the very fulfilment of your mission, maybe this is the reason for your being born in this world, the highs and lows only refuel your thirst for life.

But if you are different? What if everything begins to push you down and your perspective on life is more and more distorted by exhaustion and disgust? You realise at some point that you no longer can smell the perfume of a lilac, you even have forgotten for quite a few years that it still existed. And for how long haven’t you stood up with your eyes wide open, just for a couple of minutes, gazing at the starry vault overhead, at night?

Have you listened, lately, to the silence that descends after the melody that you used to like so long ago and that now seems to be forgotten, that unspeakable stillness without purpose, without any other finality than itself? Have you felt at late again that state of completeness, whilst, as this verse by Eminescu states – “The voice itself of thoughts has ceased...” - the pause between two thoughts that is experienced only by little babies when contemplating, sucking their thumb, no matter what fascinating object, without labelling it, classifying, weighing, without asking for the service of an evaluator?

Therefore, for now on you will return to your own source, remembering things long forgotten and you will enjoy them day-by-day, whatever happens. A patch of snow, a blooming lilac tree, a sunrise, the smile of a person you love – you will carry them inside all through the struggles of life, without thinking of them, as they are going to grow within you, without concepts, without words. Whenever you might be overcome by a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, anxiety, simply think of the ephemeral of things and thoughts which brought them about, think of the fact they only come and go whereas there is inside you a motionless consciousness that is capable particularly of realising the fact that things come and go…And then, try, for a few seconds, …not to think of anything, not even of the fact that they are ephemeral. Just imitate the car that stopped at the red light, let your mind rest in motionless, as these few moments of intermission will have it regenerated.

By taking these steps, day-by-day, your consciousness will be transformed, as the moments of stillness, of finding yourself again, will become more frequent. Only then will you be able to see your own path, being more and more aware of yourself, beyond your transient layers. To be more aware of your own essence is the only wish that may come true without turning you into its slave.