Five Different Lives
“I woke up at 5am. By 5:15, I had lived five different lives,” I overhear the woman at the table next to me say. I casually sip on my tea as I write down what she had said, doing my best to refrain from appearing suspicious.
I catch snippets of their conversation, and take in the scene of the coffee shop. It has the typical coffeehouse atmosphere, with people working busily on their laptops as they take quick breaks to take a wary sip at their hot beverages.
Locations are imbued with memory, and this coffee shop, although I didn’t discover it until recently, reminded me of all the ones that I would sit in on when I was in college just a few years ago.
Two college girls drop off their trash in the bin next to me, and chat away. I figure them to be in college because they look roughly my age, wore black leggings, backpacks, and one of them said the word, “syllabus.” I was of of them once, in a different life.
It’s funny how the fish doesn’t realize it’s in a fishbowl until it escapes, and sees the world outside of it. I think back to her and me– the person I used to be– and wonder. I haven’t thought about her in a while. Perhaps I still twinge in shame at who she was, and keep her hidden in the dark corner in my mind that I dare not shine too much light on– out of fear of what I’ll find.
She was gravely concerned and would have many restless nights over assignments that she thought would have an important role to play in the shaping of her future, but she hardly could remember any of the information she learned to complete them. She got advice from her RA about the magic of Yerba Mates, and would drink them to stay up after she got back from her shift at her part-time job at Target to work on papers that were due the next day. She would be annoyed by other students in the dorm screaming and giggling at each other late into the night as she tried to focus on her work because she was easily distractible. She would worry about her roommate talking about her while she pretended to sleep, to overhear what she had to say– she cared too much about what other people thought about her. It shaped her self-image of herself. To make herself feel better, she would scroll through dating apps, waiting for people to call her “pretty” and feel the rush of being desired by someone, even if it wasn’t real.
She was miserable, and didn’t know it. She just thought that was life.
I wonder if these girls felt as she did.
Universal Misery
There’s something universal to being miserable, I think. People accept it as part of their lives, and believes that no one can relate to it, so they keep quiet on how they feel out of fear of being the one who gets left behind.
No one wants to be the outsider at the park watching everyone else laugh– they want to be part of the joke, too.
In all of us, there is a yearning to evolve, and be better, but there is also a great fear of it. To truly evolve, there must first be a death, a death of ego– and this is what deters us because it is new and unknown. To the conscious mind, that is. We are afraid of death because we don’t understand what it is. Death is merely a part of the cycle of life, a polarity of it.
We like to think of birth as this magical, mystical process that is entirely pure because it is the opposite of death– but this is not true. Think of all the sperm that “died” on their way to fertilize the ovum.
Is this not death?
What about the cells perishing in your body as you continue to live?
Is that not death?
Death is part of life in that it paves the way for it. Without death, there cannot be life.
The Eternal City and the Ice Cube
Within all of us is an internal, eternal city of gold. This is the spirit kingdom that resides within you, and dictates every thought you have, action you make, and breath you take.
It has always been there within you. The governing forces change every so often, however, and how it is run changes. As the old regime becomes inadequate for the dawn of the new era upon the city, and falters, a new regime takes over to replace it. And when the new regime gets old, another new one arises. It is an endless cycle of death and rebirth that happens within us.
For the truth is I am no longer that college girl, and you are no longer the person that you were last year, or even last week. This cycle of death and rebirth happens on a physical level, spiritual, mental, and energetic. All aspects of you are in a constant state of evolution.
The responsibility of coming to terms with that, is another facet, altogether.
Your conscious mind is the slowest to evolve, and that’s because we depend on it so heavily. Just how you can’t use your computer when it’s updating, we cannot expect our thinking to evolve from its current state without the realization that it is in need of an upgrade. Most ignore this fact, and continue to use the faulty program that is not aligned with the new regime within us.
One of the first books that was recommended to me at the beginning of my journey of recovery was “Introduction to Gnosis” by Samael Aun Weor. At the time, I had no idea was Gnosis was, and a very limited understanding of what ego was– thanks to my Literary Theory course that I took freshman year of college.
The ego, for all intents and purposes, is our sense of self– who we believe “I” to be in the contexts of ourselves. The issue lies in what we defines ourselves to be within this human context, when this is not our whole self, or even our truest self.
We’re not concerned so much with the personality of the ice cube because we know it will melt– it’s in its nature to be temporary. This is also the case with our human selves.
The question then becomes, “Why are we so fascinated as a collective consciousness with our humanity if we know we are something greater?” Look again to the ice cube. To the ice cube, its life is an eternity, but it is just ten minutes of our time. Time is relative, and it is hard not to see the forest for the trees when you forget how many times you’ve been in the forest before.
At the time, I had a lot of questions about myself, and whenever I would ask others for answers they would shrug and smile apologetically at me, or give me a vague solution that left me feeling more frustrated than heard.
When I cracked open this book, one of the first quotes that I read was this:
“Each of us faces innumerable problems in life. Each person needs to know how to solve each of these problems intelligently. We need to comprehend each problem. The solution to each problem is in the problem itself…” (Introduction to Gnosis, Samael Aun Weor, 55).
I will admit, when I first read the quote, I was highly irritated. “The solution to each problem is in the problem itself….”, what kind of zen nonsense is that? It took a couple of weeks for it to settle past my conscious mind, and sink down to the greater aspect of myself that truly understood what he was saying.
The solution to your problems is not external, but a component of the problem that you need to discover.
A Harsh Reality
At the time, I was trying to figure out why it was that I didn’t feel like I belonged in any of the social groups at college, and why I couldn’t relate with anyone. I felt incredibly lonely, and insecure about myself, and would seek solace in community.
Within the problem, lack of belonging, was the solution– my lack of understanding who I was without one. How can you try to fit into a puzzle if you don’t know which piece you are? I had been running from figuring out who I was not just as an individual, but how my past experiences have morphed me into a different version of that individual over the years.
The version of myself who attended middle school was not the person who attended high school, was not the woman who went to college, was not the person who graduated. They may be similar, yes, but each carried thoughts, worries, aspirations, and shadows that were either healed, or passed to the next version of myself. This is how healing, and evolving, works. The issue is the lack of self-awareness in discerning what parts I have left behind, and which I think I have left behind, but still carry with me.
“If we wisely analyze ourselves, we discover that within us there is a constant state of affirmation and negation between what we want to be and what we actually are: we are poor and we want to be millionaires; we are soldiers and we want to be generals; we are single and we want to be married…. etc.” 57
The quickest way, I have learned, in determining your true psychological development and progress is looking at the contradictions between what you want for yourself, and what you are actively doing. For example, after a particularly bad breakup– I’ve had many of these over the years of attempting to hide from myself– I thought I had learned my lesson from that relationship, and created mantras of how I was comfortable being by myself and discovering who I was as I person. Should anyone had asked me, I would have told them that I wasn’t trying to date anyone, but was focusing on myself and my self-development.
But what was I doing?
I was actively scrolling through dating apps, notably Tinder, I’m ashamed to say, reeling from one interaction to the next, jonesing for the high of meeting someone new and potentially sparking a connection with someone. The possibility of being wanted and fitting into someone else’s life.
Do you see the contradiction?
Although I felt giddy about the dates, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong. Everyone my age at the time was doing it, and I tried to talk myself into being more okay with what I was doing than I was.
Once you begin to seek cultivation of spirit, and ask for guidance, and then go back to how things were as if nothing happened, there’s a discomfort that you cannot run away from or ignore. After the knowledge has been shined upon you of your true nature, to hide in the shadows and pretend that you do not know, and spurning this knowledge, is the greatest sin that you can commit. And I was committing it. Even my dreams would haunt me– showing me how much work I still needed to do.
“Within and around us, there are thousands of conflict-forming contradictions. Truly, what is within us is also in society, because – as we have said so many times– society is an extension of the individual. If there is contradiction and conflict in us, then these are also in society. If the individual does not have peace, society will not have it, either, and in these conditions the pro-peace propaganda become as a matter of fact, totally useless.” (57)
The Wayward Minds Collective 
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