Of Beginnings and the Journey

we all have our roster of teachers, those who have made the most significant influence on how we deal with our world, who have inspired us to live our lives in a more meaningful way perhaps, or to live it in a more conscious way at least.

I have been blessed with many such teachers. my parents probably have been my most constant and influential spiritual mentors, but there were many others who've popped in and out of my life, authors, friends, music, movies, emotional bottlenecks, rivers, walk paths... reflecting on it now, my spiritual life has perhaps been shaped most of all by my introduction to philosophy, through the journey that I've begun in college.

I have since then chosen not to follow just one path. perhaps its stubbornness or a lack of discipline, but I believe that the path is revealed to one as he walks on it. that if we keep our hearts open, the right, onward and upward path for us would present itself when the time has come for it to do so.

so what I do is I listen.

my life has become an ongoing conversation between me and the universe. I am surrounded by a lot of solitude, and this keeps the space around my mind vast and quiet so that I'm able to hear the echoes of insight, those silent proddings of my Spirit.

I walk a lot too, it's my most constant form of meditation. I started this more than a decade ago, when I was still in university. at first I walked out of necessity. one of my favorite professors in philosophy (Dr. Lee of the University of the Philippines) would pose a lot of interesting questions, questions that yanked my mind out of its logical frame, questions such as this: kung hindi ka ba nakakakita, wala ka bang makikita o makikita mo lahat? if you didn't have the sense of sight, would you see nothing, or would you see everything? after the class, I would be in a sort of trance-like state, not knowing how to wrap my brain around what I had heard. I needed to walk, if just to discharge the uneasiness that I felt.

it was those questions that first made me realize that there were worlds beyond language, between our words, beneath every sensory layer that we associate our solidity to. I immersed myself in the vagueness that the questions inspired and began to walk. I realized then that we need not find all the answers, that questions are sometimes meant to open up new worlds to us, wordless worlds, worlds so beautiful and real that can and should be left just as they were. and sometimes even, this experience of the wordless is itself the answer.

walking helped me take the edge off at first but after a while, I felt my mind start to empty, and I discovered that I was not just body and mind, I was energy. and as my feet touched the ground as I walked, I somehow found that everything was energy too. as I immersed myself fully in the experience, I realized further that I was not separate from anything... that I am one with everything. I also found that this energy had direction and that its essence was goodness. because I felt myself as part of that energy, the energy's flow became my direction too, and because I knew that it was good, I trusted in its wisdom.

those experiences have been the starting point of my journey, and through everything - the endless reshaping, the emotional rock-bottoms, the changing circumstances - it's that trust and certainty in the universe's goodness that remain.

it's what guided me here.