For years, I believed that inner peace would come once I understood myself. I read books, explored different teachings and questioned my own experiences. What is the mind? What is the ego? What is consciousness? Who is the one who thinks, feels, fears and suffers?
I thought there must be an answer that would make sense of it all. If I understood enough, peace would follow. Yet the questions kept coming. Gradually, I began to suspect that my need to understand was part of what kept me searching.
Today, after writing eight books, I still sometimes ask myself what the mind or the ego is. My mind sets about defining and explaining, as it always has. I let it. I no longer need an answer before I can be at peace.
When every question needed an answer
I have not rejected knowledge or stopped thinking. What I have given up is the belief that I must settle every question before I can rest.
For a long time, each unanswered question seemed to stand between me and peace. The harder I worked to make my inner life coherent, the more absorbed I became in the effort itself. It resembles the way worries get louder at night, when thinking a problem through becomes another round of worry.
A thought does not have to define me
The change began when I recognised a difference between having a thought and treating it as a statement of who I am. I could feel an emotion without defining myself by it.
Fear, sadness, anger and joy still had their place. I did not have to suppress them or explain them away. Through experience rather than theory, I found that I could feel them without letting them determine my whole sense of self.
That did not make me indifferent. I still make decisions, care for people and face difficulties. I no longer ask my mind for a final explanation of existence before allowing myself some peace.
Learning from Jung without following his path
Carl Jung’s work mattered deeply to me. It helped me see that someone could experience profound inner turmoil and still lead a meaningful life. His concept of the shadow we see in others offers a way to consider what we struggle to recognise in ourselves. But I did not want to make his path my own.
Someone else’s experience can encourage us, but it cannot do the work of understanding ourselves for us. I came to feel the same about spiritual teachers and philosophical traditions. Their words could help me understand my experience, but they could also give me another set of expectations to live up to.
Eventually, I stopped measuring my life against other people’s descriptions of awakening. I stopped trying to produce a particular inner state or waiting for the next insight. I walked, read, wrote and talked with people. Happiness and sadness were still there.
Understanding without chasing it
Sometimes an insight comes without effort. Its sudden arrival does not make it true. I can question it or set it aside. I can also accept it without needing to chase the next one.
I once expected understanding to bring me peace. Now I can welcome it without depending on it. That difference matters more to me than any particular insight.
When I use the word awakening, I do not mean secret knowledge or an escape from ordinary life. Thought and emotion have not disappeared. I simply feel less compelled to identify with every thought, feeling or story that passes through my awareness.
What changed for me
This is a change in my own experience, not a universal formula or a psychological treatment. I have no wish to prescribe my experience to someone else. Other people’s answers could not replace my own understanding; I cannot expect mine to replace theirs.
I spent years looking for the answer that would finally let me rest. Thoughts still come and go, but I no longer need to settle them all. I can live with questions I have not answered.
