Welcome, dear friends. Welcome to the journey of knowing your deep self, which shall bring you into freedom. Freedom from your expectations, insecurities, lies, and all that stands between you and… you.
Let me first introduce myself. I am a psychiatric patient. I have probably always been a psychiatric patient; I was just too busy to give it any thought. I was doing virtually everything possible to avoid any thought that could slow me down, as I had so many important things to do. When thoughts began to catch up with me and I started to stumble, I adjusted by running faster. Until there was no more space left to adjust, and forty-four years of mental debt crashed over me. It hit me one morning like a hurricane, followed by a sweeping tsunami, finishing me off with a massive earthquake. Done.
It took me another year to admit that something was probably really not all right. Multiple severe psychiatric diagnoses, psychiatric medications, psychiatric consultations – while being unable to leave my apartment for a year – brought me to the conclusion that all of those are pretty much qualities of a psychiatric patient.
The interesting part was that when I openly spoke to people around me, I found out that I was far from alone. Even if not to the same extent, it was striking to observe that, at first sight, normally functioning people were shattered inside: a reality disclosed when they directly told me they could not hold on anymore, by sharing how much they needed some space for themselves, or – most obviously – by meeting in a psychiatric waiting room. I realized that the pattern was so repetitive that it felt like an epidemic of living our lives in varying degrees of detachment. Presumably, the vast majority even unknowingly… And I was within it.
That whole year, I spent most of my time in meditations and prayers, experiencing an enormous number of small enlightenments, in my better moments deepening them by enriching my medical and psychological knowledge – to the point that, in one meditation, I felt I was going to explode from an abundance of insights, and there was no other choice but to start writing. In a day I identified about forty themes that could be the framework of the book, and that hasn’t changed much since. What changed is the scope of information; therefore, in the end I decided to divide everything I wanted to share into four parts.
Now, what to anticipate. You see the first part, the number of chapters in the whole tetralogy, you do the simple math, and you wonder what this is trying to be. Admittedly, my opinion is that there are books about all the themes I am exploring – emotions, forgiveness, anxiety, meditations – name it, you have it. I am hardly bringing anything new in the scope of raw information. Nevertheless, my concern is that, although I read many books, I rarely found one that constructively blended, connected in wholeness what unfolds in our minds and hearts. It naturally requires an enormous amount of information, and why rewrite what is already written and create one unreadable encyclopedia.
Very correct. However, then, there is that perspective of personal experience, which, in our lives, reveals the main aspects requiring focus. It is that painful process of realization and shaping. On the one hand, it restricts the Spiral to my personal experience; on the other, it has already passed the fire of cleansing.
What I realized is that everything in us is extremely interconnected, intertwined, creating one network of wholeness that cannot be broken into specific fragments. Reading a book about anxiety helps me understand anxiety, but has no chance of solving it if I have issues with forgiveness. Trying to focus on meditation will inevitably fail if I do not eat well. I cannot find the divine if I do not search for myself. I have realized that all the themes I named are so interconnected that if I dive into solving anxiety, I may, for a while, sustain that depth, but I will inevitably be pulled back to the state where I am in wholeness. Hence, I need to slowly attend to all the aspects, and once all are a bit more enlightened, it will naturally let me get closer to breathing freely. And as I imagine it as a spiral – with many little connections trying to unfold deeper, but able to unfold only in wholeness – I titled it Spiral.
So, what lies ahead. Probably nothing pleasant. This is not a reading for a relaxed evening time. Probably not even for the beach and tequila. This is probably not even a reading. It is an invitation to exhausting focus, with perhaps not infrequently challenging realizations. So why would you possibly bother to read it? Only because you wish to. You have a feeling that you want to try something else. And yes, the freedom. The pull of our inner self to experience freedom. But I am sorry to say this – freedom is not volitional. Peace in freedom is not volitional. Chances are, most of us will never experience absolute inner freedom and peace. That is life in this world. But it is totally all right, as peace and freedom are primarily not states of being, but lighthouses giving us direction, and at the same time, indicators showing us that we are on the right path.
Also, I have to acknowledge that this book is, or perhaps is only trying to be, imperfect. Yes, intentionally. It is written in the ongoing storm of my recovery, or rather, healing journey, as of now not knowing who I actually am. I am trying to let my soul be free for divine inspiration, yet immediately find myself restricting the divine to submit to my control. Which definitely does not work. So I am trying, as a pathological control-freak perfectionist, to let things go, allow them to unfold at their natural pace, and let the writing be divine, rather than a brain-controlled picture of what is perfect. In other words, just as the cure for addiction is abstinence, I am trying to abstain – hence, intentional imperfectionism.
To avoid putting doubts into your minds, again – why imperfect. Because when I was giving literally the worst-performed lecture in my life – twice leaving the auditorium to discuss with God what is going on, that I cannot be this utterly blocked, mumbling and actually having no clue what the next sentence will be – the next week my students came to me, saying they had spent the whole week talking about the lecture (Oh my... I really screwed up), that it was one of the best lectures they had attended (What?! Were you in the same auditorium as me?!). And they apparently were not making fun of me. Well. Now choose between the divine and humbleness versus perfection and pride.
With genuine love, your fellow pilgrim.