I inherited a great house.
And now I stand at its door, though it was not easy to find.
Usually, a front door is something grand and welcoming, well lit and easy to recognise. It has a nameplate, a bell, a doormat. But the door to my house is nothing like that. It does not invite you in. It offers no help. It is hidden, unremarkable, hardly welcoming at all.
Anyone wishing to enter this house must be strongly determinate – and, at the same time, experience a tiny flash of recognition:
Aha. These are THE doors I have to open myself… the most important doors of my life.
I do not know what I am doing here. Nor do I know on opening these doors where this will lead me.
Once, for a brief moment, I thought I had put the puzzle together, piece by piece – the fragments of knowledge I had been searching for. I thought I had discovered the mystery of life: the connection between its everyday ordinariness and its meaning, its grandeur. And I thought that, for the sake of balance, I still had to uncover the mystery of death, in all its different depths.
And then—nothing but wonder upon wonder.
Today, those convictions I held years ago make me smile.
Perhaps that is precisely why I find myself standing at the threshold of this great house.
Letting go of our beliefs opens a new path. This is where everything begins.
It is said that the most important thing is to have a plan, so naturally, I have one.
I will walk through my new house. I will light a few candles. I will open every door, look into every room, and say hello.
Here I am.
I step inside.
I say, “Good morning.”
It is dark.
I light the first candle.
Before me stretches a corridor and that unsettling silence.
My house does not welcome me.
I feel like a stranger.
There are doors everywhere, on both sides of the corridor.
Every one of them is closed.
But calmly. One at a time.
I stick to the plan.
I have to open the first door and become familiar with the first room.
Take the first step.
So I choose the first door I come to.
Some force draws me inside.
The room is crowded with all kinds of beings. People, animals, paintings, colours – even scents. It is noisy, crowded, alive, joyful.
I look at everything carefully, with a strange feeling that I know it all.
I know all these beings.
Familiar emotions pass through me.
And yet I discover that this joyful place is merely one hidden corner of a vast labyrinth.
In other corners, an overwhelming darkness reigns.
Walking through the labyrinth is like moving from white into black and then back again.
Joy becomes sorrow.
It is as though I have fallen into some kind of abyss.
And yet I feel that I must stay here for a while. I must walk through this labyrinth. I must understand it.
Because if I do not understand it, I will never be free of it.
The darkness hidden in its corners pulsates.
Helplessness and fear take hold of me.
But I know these feelings.
Helplessness has always awakened determination in me. Fear has always disappeared when I turned toward the Light.
So I search for the Light.
The Light within me.
With relief, I find a second candle.
I light it.
In its glow, I see a little girl sitting on the floor.
She has hidden her face in her hands, as though trying to protect herself from the darkness that fills the room.
I feel her loneliness.
But at the same time, I know I cannot take her away from here.
Time passes slowly in the labyrinth.
It stretches and stretches, until I have the feeling that I have been here for an eternity, forever entangled in the affairs of this room.
Slowly, I begin to understand.
I am in the room of the PAST.
I do not want to be here anymore.
Something in me refuses to keep wandering through a bygone era of my life.
And then everything disappears.
This is the power of an inner decision.
I close the door behind me.
Once again, I am in the corridor.
I see the first candle, the one I lit when I entered the house.
Its light seems stronger now.
Warmer.
More welcoming.
My journey through the labyrinth of the past has brought me to an understanding of the importance of our thoughts and their mysterious creative power.
We are the creators of the labyrinths whose endless twists and turns eventually make us their prisoners.
It takes great determination to free ourselves from the habit of living in the past – from all the patterns that keep sending us in circles through similar events, entangling us in similar relationships, stealing from us those precious spaces of emptiness within ourselves.
Understanding the past frees us from the emotions attached to it, leaving in our memory nothing but a record of what happened.
I continue down the corridor of my house.
Now I notice words written on the doors.
Little nameplates telling me what each room contains.
They were not there before.
It is as though the house, by naming its rooms, is giving me the freedom to choose.
At the far end of the corridor, a faint light flickers.
That, too, is new.
It will not leave me alone.
I feel I should start running toward it, straight down the corridor.
And yet something holds me back.
Something strong.
Compelling.
Something that keeps me firmly in place.
I read the nameplate on the next door:
THE FUTURE.
Something tells me to pass this room by.
But another voice inside me is called curiosity.
So, naturally, I enter.
At once I find myself caught in an endless algorithm.
It is full of gates, entrances and exits, possible solutions, endless speculation.
What if?
What will happen when…?
What happens if…?
Wandering through the algorithm of the future is every bit as exhausting as getting lost in the labyrinth of the past.
So where, then, is the present?
Is it in lighting the third candle and fleeing back into the corridor?
Why do I choose escape rather than simply walking out?
Because escape requires determination.
A kind of daring.
That reckless courage that comes with running away.
It is an act of transformation – here and now, immediate and complete.
This inner escape illuminates the corridor.
I see that it is wider now.
More spacious.
The claustrophobic unease that has accompanied me since I entered the house has disappeared.
I see countless doors, each bearing a different name.
There is a room of honesty.
A room of patience.
A room of humility.
A room of sincerity.
A room of gentleness.
And many more.
An endless succession of doors.
I feel that I can pass them by, resisting their pull.
And perhaps, by doing so, I can keep moving without spending my life on the endless project of perfecting myself.
And then I see the word:
KNOWLEDGE.
I open the door to this intriguing room.
I light the fourth candle.
Against one wall stands a huge bookcase filled with books.
It is difficult not to be overwhelmed by the possibilities of this magnificent place.
I begin to read.
And read.
And read.
I feel as though all of this knowledge is filling me completely, leaving no space for anything else.
The knowledge is so magnificent that I remain in this room for a very long time.
Other seekers of knowledge are here with me.
There are many of them.
They discuss.
They form clubs and groups.
They create methods and systems.
I become one of them.
And yet one thought will not leave me alone.
This is not my knowledge.
It is someone else’s knowledge.
Someone else’s recognition.
Someone else’s understanding.
Someone else’s inspiration, clothed in words chosen by someone else.
Remembering those words – and even trying to live according to them – can never turn them into our own inspiration, our own understanding, our own deep insight.
The thoughts of others, preserved in texts, can make us followers, devotees of someone else’s theory, imitators.
Immersed in someone else’s writings, listening to someone else’s words, we can never become fully autonomous.
Many people say that such teachings inspire them. That they give them access to different methods and different ideas. That they can evaluate them, compare them, decide what is right and what is wrong.
They can quote endlessly from enlightened people, from the wise, from those who claim to understand the entire universe.
But none of that can settle the matter in their own lives.
It can never become knowledge gained firsthand.
These thoughts are so clear, so obvious, that I leave the room of knowledge without regret.
I leave the candle burning behind me.
The corridor changes again.
I am beginning to forget what it looked like when I first entered this extraordinary house.
I keep walking.
And then I see a door bearing the word:
WORDS.
I know immediately that I must enter.
The room of knowledge has filled me with so many words that I need to look at them closely.
In some way, I need to come to terms with them.
So I enter into a meeting with words.
I light the fifth candle.
And I see all those words — and the energies swirling around them.
Words emerge from our mouths.
They reach us through our ears and our eyes.
They live inside our thoughts.
One might say that they are part of us.
They are everywhere.
We create them.
We repeat them.
The word is one of the most powerful tools available to a human being.
And, as human beings tend to do, we use the tools at our disposal in very different ways.
I see many beautiful words that have lost their radiance.
And yet they continue to circulate among people, even though they have been enslaved by destructive intentions, stolen from the Light, stripped of their original power.
To a more conscious human being, they ceased to be beautiful long ago.
There are words burdened with suffering.
Today, it is difficult to disenchant them, to free them from the weight they carry.
Some things cannot be defended away.
Cannot be erased.
Cannot simply be reinterpreted.
And even if, in the minds of many of us, these words still carry their original meaning – if they remain precious to us, even sacred – the dark force that people have attached to them over centuries still exists.
A force born of shameful actions and thoughts.
A force whose reach can be vast.
Standing in the room of words, I understand that one cannot simply cleanse an important word.
One cannot simply free it from darkness while knowing that it speaks of great ideas, unexplored energies, exalted thoughts, the deepest truths – and at the same time feeling that all of this is disturbed by the crimes, suffering and falsehood that seem to stand on the other side of that very word.
Egregores cling to words like vultures.
They steal their purity.
They drain away their light.
And then they convert that stolen power into fuel for their own dark practices of manipulation.
Looking at the words in their room leads me to another thought:
Any word that needs additional explanation;
any word that needs an advocate in order to be properly understood;
any word that cannot defend itself –
is not the purest word.
It is not the most precise.
It is not the most unambiguous.
It is not the key.
And yet, among all these words, there are some that have not been completely defiled.
So I leave the room.
I take with me my own dictionary, created intuitively.
I know that these powerful tools will still be useful for some time.
But at the same time, I begin to sense the saving power of emptiness.
Emptiness has its own lists.
Its own messages.
Messages without words.
The corridor grows brighter again.
The first candle burns with a clear, undisturbed flame.
This is the moment of inner illumination.
The moment of understanding.
My thoughts return to the little girl I met in the room of the past.
And now I know what I would like to give her.
What I would like to place in her hands before she sets out on the difficult road that lies ahead.
So I send her a letter from emptiness.
A letter in which this moment of understanding is hidden.
And then I notice another room.
But this room has no door.
No nameplate.
It does not even have walls.
It is an immense space filled with wonders, filled with everything that is new.
I did not take the words with me from the room of WORDS – the words I might have used to describe this place.
Why didn’t I take them?
Because they were not there.
I feel that I must choose a word myself, from my own dictionary.
A word with which I can name this place while doing it as little harm as possible.
And so I choose one.
I call this place the space of INSPIRATION.
The sixth candle in my hands lights itself.
I stand in the middle of the space and feel a presence sparkling all around me.
A PRESENCE.
Fortunately, I do not know how to name it.
I cannot define it.
I cannot imprison it within judgments.
And perhaps that is precisely its gift.
I know that everything I find in this space is available to everyone.
The only thing that limits our access to it is what blocks us from within.
I can see those blockages more and more clearly.
The corridor disappears.
The rooms disappear, one after another, taking with them the candles I left behind.
The walls fall away.
My house is slowly ceasing to exist.
All that remains in my hands is one final candle.
Who will light it?
What is it made of?
And what kind of fire will burn within it?
I do not know.
This story has no ending.
It has no final full stop of its own.
This story is only the beginning.
