My periodic desire to escape from myself has nothing to do with a desire for death or an end to life.
It suddenly clicked for me what Eckhart Tolle meant when he said he had wanted to kill himself — and how, in the very moment he realized it, he understood that he didn’t actually want to leave life, but wanted to kill himself — the version of himself he was not.
After all, you can’t really kill yourself. The one who would kill and the one who would be killed cannot be the same.
People who commit suicide want to kill a part of themselves — the part that hurts, suffers, and struggles.
But what they end up killing is their body.
And you can’t kill yourself that way.
Because I am not my body.
Which means that killing my body wouldn’t actually accomplish the goal of escaping from myself.
Lyuba Rykiel once said to a friend who was contemplating suicide, “Why are you killing yourself like that! You’ll never kill yourself that way!” She struck right at the heart of it.
I realized that what I want to escape from is not my true self, not my body — but that part of me that keeps sitting its ass down on the same burning-hot frying pan, over and over again, and then blames its own unlucky ass for the pain.
On one hand, of course, it’s true: this “ass” believes that the main goal in life is to find a frying pan you can sit on comfortably.
Though perhaps I’ve gotten a little carried away with the colorful metaphors.
Let me simplify.
Several years ago, I realized that it all comes down to love.
We crave it — and we don’t have it.
(And of course, the more desperately you crave it, the more elusive it becomes, but that’s another story.)
The point is, all people — all people, except perhaps the enlightened ones — seek only one thing: love.
That much was clear to me long ago.
But I thought I was different.
Once, I decided I had become enlightened — that I wouldn’t seek love anymore.
That I would find joy in other joys of life.
And that’s exactly when love ambushed me.
Needless to say, after that “love,” it took me a long time to recover…
A lot of time has passed since then — and again, I found myself disappointed in love.
I decided that nothing would ever work out for me, that I didn’t believe anymore, that I was done.
It hurt terribly, and no matter what I tried — trying to live without hope for love — all my efforts collapsed into nothingness.
All the tricks like “let’s pretend we don’t need it” — all of them were limp, half-hearted attempts that Stanislavsky would have undoubtedly booed off the stage with his famous cry.
The moral of this story is that in these past few days — maybe two or three weeks — I have come to understand a great deal about life and myself.
I threw myself into grand undertakings, hoping to do something meaningful for humanity (a pretty big ambition, I know)…
But these projects froze in place.
Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I had no energy —
Me, who could be sliced into pieces of pure energy like a giant wedding cake — had none at all.
I started sleeping more — practically all the time.
Dragging my feet.
Suffering enormously.
And most of all — unable to understand why.
Why wasn’t such a noble cause — the betterment of humanity — enough to move me forward?
Instead, it was quite the opposite…
And then it hit me.
I was once again pretending — pretending that I wasn’t doing all of this to receive love.
But you can’t fool nature: the motivation was false.
Helping humanity didn’t move forward because helping humanity was never really the goal.
Ha!
Caught you!
The one I want to escape from is that small, pitiful ego that has been dragging the blanket over to its side all my life, sucking the energy out of me with its desperate craving for love —
Pretending that its motives are all about making the world a better place.
I want to escape forever from that little worm inside me, hiding deep within, slurping away my life force with its hunger for love —
while playing innocent, like it’s all for the good of humanity.
Choke on your control panel, you manipulative little thing.
Suddenly, I remembered Monsters vs. Aliens —
I’m just like Gallaxhar, who wanted to kill everyone and enslave the survivors, and of course, he wanted more quantonium!
I suddenly saw it clearly.
I saw that “Gallaxhar” part of me — the part that had been successfully fooling me for years.
I saw how helpless that little figure truly was.
And how strong — and simple (in the best sense) — I am compared to it.
I saw that somehow, by some miracle, I had managed to free myself from its distorted vision of the world.
The puppeteer’s strings have been cut.
The bridges burned.
The glasses have fallen.
No water. No moon.
Love is a gift.
Like everything in this life —
but Love is a special gift, because everyone, without exception, wants it.
Some people chase power, some chase money, others fame…
But at the root of it all, they crave love.
They desire it passionately.
We receive many, many gifts throughout our lives —
but we overlook them, because nothing seems more valuable to us than Love.
We charge into relationships, believing they are the source of love —
and we are wrong.
We spend years with people who feel distant to us, just because something in the relationship vaguely resembles our idea of Love.
But those ideas about Love —
they’re just meaningless domino dots.
Because those who crave Love the most…
don’t know what it actually is.
And Love —
is a gift.
And there is only one way to receive it.
And that way has nothing to do with anything external to each of us.
I knew that.
You knew that.
We all know it.
But inside our heads sits a crooked little worm — Ego — who has muddled our minds, fed us illusions.
It desperately wants quantonium —
and quantonium comes from the burning hunger —
the craving for Love.
I realized all this while chewing tofu and sipping miso soup.
My reality — which had already begun melting away like Marty McFly’s hand in Back to the Future when his parents almost didn’t get together —
suddenly became solid again,
just like when George kissed Lorraine.
Suddenly the mountains, the ocean, the beautiful road — all rose up from the mist.
The Japanese candies, the teriyaki chicken, my beautiful hands, my blue jeans —
everything came flooding back into sharp focus.
There was suddenly so much of everything that it hurt my eyes —
and tears welled up.
Because I have so much.
So many gifts.
So much joy.
So many opportunities.
So many days to enjoy it all.
So many desires to do good, meaningful things for others.
So much strength.
So many friends.
So much light.
And mountains.
And the ocean.
And miso soup.
%)
And in that moment —
I killed it.
You have no more power over me, Gesser — ego — you little black worm.
I am no longer you.
And Love —
is a gift.
And it is shameful, dear sir, to demand a gift.
Shameful to beg and plead for it like a little street urchin.
Go and rejoice in all the other gifts you already have.
And —
emptiness.
A beautiful silence.