Α35. The mind accepts the zero point of his existence.

The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.

Α35. The mind accepts the zero point of his existence.

The mind remembers that he has felt the same inner peace again sometimes in the past, whenever he found himself in adverse conditions where the tough reality had made him accept that he is still at zero point. By the first and most painful of his separations, at the age of twenty-two, he met for the first time with this relieving kind of inner peace, after a relentless inner war which lasted for exactly three months.

All of a sudden, unexpectedly and “heartlessly”, as he used to say at the time, his darling abandoned him, because she fell in love with somebody else. The pain of the separation was unbearable, as this had been his first long-lasting relationship. He had been used to her; he had taken her love for granted. By this separation, he felt as if somebody had violently uprooted the half of himself. He did not have the right anymore to touch her tender dark-skinned body! He missed her unimaginably; his hands and fingers in vain sought everywhere to touch her. He felt bewitched, held captive by the woman who had injured him “unfairly” and with no warning.

He ached to stop suffering. He could not bear to be the pawn of the pain. His ego could not stand the idea that he had become a rag due to a woman! He could not face up to the fact that despite the many years of experience and knowledge he had been left so much behind. This did not conform to his self-image; he had never believed that he would ever find himself in such a difficult position. He had no courage to continue his studies or to get a job. Several years had passed since he left school, but he had not yet managed to study or start a successful career; on top of it he had not even overcome the addiction to the presence of a woman in his life.

He could not fit in any place. He squirmed, he wailed, he could not bear the pain, he did not believe that he would ever be cured; he did not trust the time to be able to cure him. He had bottomed out. He sat now on the zero point of his existence, but he did not want to admit it. For three months he was at an inner war.

He travelled to Paris for ten days, in order to get a change of scenery and escape the intolerable pain. Ten subsequent days, with his antennas fully opened, the mind insatiably sucked new impressions, hearings, entertainments, tastes, smells, perfumes and the students’ circles of the friends who hosted him.

Every morning he put on his thick boots and throughout the day walked on streets covered by snow half meter high. Totally alive he roamed in the tunnels of the Parisian metro, on the bridges over the Seine, stood entranced in front of exquisite itinerant artists of all kinds, visited Notre Dame and the Louvre, and walked along the Champs-Elysées and other sights of the City of Light. He met with people from all races of the world and found that he was able to understand and talk French, a language which had been nearly unknown to him until then. He saw the homeless clochards being lost in their own world; hence, he realized that his own misery was peanuts. He fell in love with another world; apparently, it was the perfect timing for him to meet with such a magic world as Paris.

Hereby, the mind got a change of scenery, thus allowing the pain for the loss of his darling as well as the inner fury for his weakness to simmer down. The day he came back the anticipated change took place in him. He dared to confess:

“I am nil. Regarding career, emotions, studies, I am at zero point in all levels, because my emotional insecurity constantly instigates me to incorrect choices and slothfulness. Other coeval persons proceed and conquer the battlefields one after another; I have left school since nearly five years ago, yet I am still at zero point, and even more behind than that. I do not believe in myself at all. I have null self-confidence and inexistent self-esteem. I barely know how to handle people, how to survive, how to be content. I am in a state of total ignorance, like when I was a newborn infant.

“This is reality; it is useless to demand from the infant to be strong. I know nothing; I am in total ignorance regarding the survival rules of the adults. I make only mistakes all the time. Due to ignorance I do not carry any responsibility for my mistakes. Besides, I am not obliged to know anything. Until yesterday I was a child for everybody; all of a sudden everybody demands from me to grow up and become a strong and responsible person. I do not accept this responsibility, as it is irrational. I am sitting on the bottom; I am at zero point of my existence. So, I start today, as if this were the first day of my life, exactly like when I was a newborn infant, with the desire to live, but without having any knowledge about how happiness can be achieved, without carrying any responsibility for anything, without thinking that I must definitely succeed and without being to blame for the mistakes I shall make. I am innocent for both me past and my future!

“All the mistakes I have committed until now are my whole wealth; they are my very self. They are not something for which I should feel sorry or furious. They are simply the equipment of my aura, the tools, the base which stays at my disposal for the future. I carry all my experiences and all my mistakes, the weaknesses, the imperfections on me, around me, inside me, as ingredients of my aura. With them together I travel in the world, I live within them, I can feel their warmth. I can feel the intimacy of the presence of myself, no matter how imperfect he is. I am free to be nil, I allow me to be a failure; I am not obliged to be a success. I allow me to be unhappy; I am not obliged to be happy”.

Thereby, the hard crust of the “musts” shattered in my body, the grindings tumbled down through the trunk, passed from the heart vibrating it sweetly. The legs tingled and broke apart; a sweet feeling of dissolution befell in the whole body. Only the pain remained, the pain for the loss of the beloved one, alone at last, uncontaminated by the fascistic demand for me to be strong and untouched by pain. The sleep that followed maybe was the sweetest I have ever slept, as the grief for the deprivation of the beloved one was now cushioned by the liberation from the mind’s strictness.

Since then I have regressed many times. Every time it seemed to me that I had recovered my strength, unfortunately I also unwittingly recovered the demand to preserve and increase it. As a result, by the first mistake, by the first indication of weakness, I saw red and restarted the same vain inner war which I had given up for a short period.

Sooner or later, I recalled again the principle of non-demand­ing and the sweet forbearance brought by the admittance that I am at the zero point as well as the acceptance of my absolute ignorance. I wondered every time why I forgot this princi­ple again, since I had decided to definitively give up the fas­cistic demand to be strong and perfect. I re-endorsed the acceptance of the self, thus sweetening the pain. By that means, I finally quieted down and went out into the world again, being keen for new achievements.

The same cycle has repeated itself several times. The repetition educated my mind, so the duration of each cycle has now been reduced. The mind is now potent to return to the center of himself more easily, thus forsaking somewhere on the outer edge the anger for his failures and the desperation for the “lost years”,[1] which, as it was finally proved, were anything but lost, as they produced, with the raw material of pain and desperation, the final product of knowledge, on which his current flexibility, if any, is based.