An outer journey can be an inner journey.
Feeling lonely or being alone is unpleasant for many people. Not for me, I feel comfortable alone. There must be something wrong with me. I am – as my wife says – unable to have a relationship, or I am afraid of closeness, or I’m afraid to open up. It’s completely natural to be with people. But not me, I felt really comfortable during the corona period. Is that strange?
Psychologically, it’s clear. I was often hurt in my youth and later, I was one of those guys who are always on the fringes, one of the losers, who are worth nothing, at least in the opinion of others. So I withdrew and tried my luck on my own, in solitude. No contact means no risk of injury. The wounded deer flees into the dense forest to die. Yes, that is the explanation.
For almost 20 years, every year in summer and sometimes in winter I went hiking in Lapland, in the wild, without paths, without a hut, through swamps and dense forests. Mobile phones don’t work there. I only had an emergency call transmitter with me to reassure my wife.
It’s a button that can call for help via satellite.
At no time was I lonely there. I had a feeling of well-being, of being at home. I was not a stranger. 10 kilometres around there was no one. If I fall into a stream and hit my head on a stone, I’m dead. I also met a female bear with her cub about 15 metres away. And yet I felt at home there. With a few exceptions I was never afraid.
The esoterics would say: yes, of course, a previous incarnation of yours lived there and was happy. And you remember that now. Honestly, I’m not interested in that. I’m just here and living now. Everything in me counts and is important, perhaps even essential, but why that is
is unimportant. What counts is the now, and that’s just the way it is and that is important to me. I know that everything that needs to be resolved will always be shown to me for as long as it is necessary.
Strange things happened in Lapland. The area up there is poor in physical stimuli: in summer you come across lakes, swamps, trees, boulders, hills, mountains and snowfields (and of course mosquitoes). On the first day I have not yet arrived (internally), the second day I realise that I’m in Lapland, and on the third day it becomes monotonous. On the fourth day, thoughts and feelings arise that previously had no place. I realise my pain, my suffering.
I then walk through the woods crying. On the fifth day it continues and on the sixth, everything that needed to come out was out. I am then calm, relaxed and detached. It’s a real catharsis (cleansing).
It got worse during the winter hikes. Everything is white, snow everywhere, wind, white out
(fog with a visibility of 1 metre) and cold. Absolute silence day and night. Only the cracking of the ice on the lakes (these are part of rivers and move the ice). The air is cold and pure. Everything is even less stimulating. The journey inside is longer and deeper because of the long nights. My coldest night was at -35°C in the tent. The evening before that night the sky was full of northern lights. Absolutely stunning. The sky becomes light in the darkness. Just as the darkened consciousness turns bright. The light always shines, even in the deepest darkness. I then realised I was never really lonely. I was alone, but never lonely.
Later in my life, things became clearer. Perhaps it was inability to relate in the beginning, but in the end it was the longing for peace, quiet and immersion in the silence that speaks very, very softly. In solitude, this silence is much easier to hear than in the din of a city. The lesson was to recognise that everything is within us and that everything important is at work in every moment of life and can therefore be recognised. Only our mental images, the jumble of feelings and the chaos of desires lie like a large, heavy, wet towel on the soul and suffocate it.
If we want to ‘hear’ the silence of the soul, then it is easiest in outer silence, in solitude.
When we do something on the outside and do it symbolically also for our inner self, then it also has an inward effect. By doing it consciously, it has the power to be effective on the inside. When we clean, for example, this can take place on two levels: We are busy to make something clean, and at the same time we clean something in our own soul. Cleaning on the outside is then also cleaning on the inside, at least a little. We then not only find the item in question more beautiful because it is clean, but because our soul has become a little bit purer. Hiking means walking through a landscape, but it can also be walking through the soul. Just as new places are discovered on the outside we can discover the blind spots of our soul. Just as we rejoice in the beauty on the outside, we rejoice in every solved problem, because this is where the soul becomes beautiful. We realise that we are walking towards ourselves in this way.
In this every person has their own path, and no one has to wander in solitude to find themselves. The only important thing is that we really walk our path, because it is the purpose of this path that it is travelled.
