Are you ready to dive into a vast sea of meaning with the hope of finding yourself within it? Or will you continue escaping by taking the familiar paths of “blaming others” without ever diving into the sea of meaning at all? When the ice around your frozen emotions begins to melt, are you ready to taste the often-bitter flavors of feelings that still remain as fresh as the day they formed?
Everyone has a definition of meaning, an explanation of existence, a goal, a chosen path, a direction they turn toward and follow. Sometimes we walk on someone else’s path, need the guidance of someone else’s direction, or live someone else’s life under their responsibility—without taking any risks ourselves. We become caretakers of others’ desires and fear desiring our own. Wanting feels like a cost; we imagine that the end of desire is death. Because we dislike prohibitions, we give up wanting altogether and live only in the world of needs, in the safe atmosphere of a cartoon, making everything possible only in our fantasies, living inside an autism-like bubble.
At the cost of failing to mature, we lead a raw and tasteless life, breathing in the unhappiness mixed into the chaos of our daily routines.
Then later, we speak of suffocation, monotony, and habits, and we become sorrowful.
Sometimes we wander along the shores of depression, sometimes we step into it and then step out again. We fear the depth of meaning and instead wander safely—but without awareness—in the shallow waters of meaninglessness. Yes, eventually we “wander,” and our “thoughts become entangled,” and in the tangled mass of thoughts that has become like a ball of knotted yarn, we become confused in the face of complex and difficult emotions. Then we accept and internalize this confusion, placing it on a legal foundation with phrases like “after all, what is life anyway,” building our sense of self upon it and anchoring ourselves to momentary comforts and quick fixes.
Most people invent various games—or play the ones already invented—to avoid encountering themselves. Like a game of hide-and-seek, they spend their lives running from themselves, lacking the courage to stand face to face with their own being. Many people claim that they already know all of this, thus closing the gates of awareness and halting their development. To understand means to grow tired, to tear down what exists, to build anew, and to show the courage to do all of this. Courage—yes, I say courage—is required, for “understanding,” “being understood,” and “expressing oneself” are difficult. The path to understanding is “words”—language, speech, and the feelings behind those words. When we live through events or are exposed to something, we feel everything at the freshness of that moment. Once events end, we assume they are forgotten, gone, and we switch off the “feeling circuits.”
Sometimes in dreams, we feel those emotions in all their nakedness, living them in their most intense, vivid, and powerful form down to our very bones. And when we awaken, it becomes incredibly difficult to shake off those feelings. The emotion has wrapped itself around us, enveloping us fully, and all we can do is escape quickly into the safety of consciousness. We want relief, because not feeling is salvation. And consciousness renders those feelings ineffective and defenseless, and we armor ourselves with whatever keeps them from touching us. Numbness becomes salvation, a solution to helplessness. Yet numbness is like living behind bars—protected but isolated, reducing the space in which one can move, shrinking the path of exploration, making the inner journey nearly impossible. We live in familiar places, memorize the same scenery, construct an impoverished imagination, and eventually open the lid of boredom.
Eventually, the need to question meaning, to seek meaning, is forced to reveal itself through the presence of illnesses. Asking, questioning, and investigating begin under the weight of suffering and exhaustion caused by illness—but cannot be sustained.
Gaining awareness, fleeing awareness, and fleeing oneself are uniquely human. Sometimes changing countries, sometimes changing cities, or rearranging our work environment is nothing more than decoration. The décor changes; what lies behind it remains.
In recent years, many people frequently confess how much they are running away. As if it were an admission. But this is nothing more than false insight created to avoid true insight. For example, they speak endlessly about sleep being an escape, or how the changes in their lives are forms of escape. They continue fleeing without ever experiencing the awareness of being aware. They both run and speak of running. Some flee to alcohol, others to drugs; many find something else to numb themselves. And they begin by saying, “I know I’m numbing myself,” and end with the same sentence. At this point, the helplessness of not knowing what to do, the refusal of the wisdom that awareness brings, leaves them trapped within repetitive and sterile thoughts—or living as though under the yoke of familiar and socially approved emotions.
What distinguishes us from animals is not only that we possess consciousness, but that we can be aware of our consciousness—and that we have the autonomy to experience this awareness. I am not speaking of being knowledgeable or gaining information, but of the ability to comprehend oneself blended with one’s thoughts, emotions, and affective states. One can find oneself in dreams, in relationships, in the things one wants to say but censors, in the things one wants to do but cannot, in the moments one must speak when one wants to remain silent or must remain silent when one wants to speak; in the past, in past conflicts, in reflections from past to present, in what one projects onto others, in what one takes from others as one’s own, in desires, urges, needs, in what one does not want to know, in what one cannot dare to know, and in reckless acts of false heroism, dependencies, or proclamations of independence.
The places where people can find themselves are so numerous that what they can discover with the weapon of courage far exceeds what they stand to lose. Everything I have said thus far represents the landscape one may encounter when deciding to embark on an inner journey.
Journeys are exciting, enjoyable, full of surprises—sometimes unexpected events, unexpected developments, uncontrollable experiences, fears, thrills, emotions that can be felt down to your marrow, tangled and complicated thoughts, creative ideas, the taste of discovery, the wisdom of seeing new places, the richness of valuing time and coloring life.
Repairing identity, constructing the self, rewriting one's personal history is only possible by understanding what one has lived and experienced. Understanding what one has lived is only possible by listening to the past, because the past relaxes as it is listened to and releases its grip on the present. Denying the past means denying the foundation. I am not referring to revisiting childhood per se, but to the fact that in our daily relationships, we encounter breezes—or sometimes fierce storms—of the past. Preventing the breeze from turning into a storm is easy, but a storm rarely destroys; destruction is created by the storm itself. By denying, ignoring, dismissing, or overlooking, we believe we have overcome many things, but what we have overcome is not our conflicts; it is merely the temporary silencing of our anxieties. Silenced anxieties, ignored desires that are not understood, return as screams—and in the face of those screams, we remain like helpless children. And under the reins of helplessness, we continue our path with emptiness and a tasteless sense of existence.
