brief glimpses of life

The bookshelves in my parents’ home are filled with self-help literature. Titles like The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, The Power of Now, and How to Be A Badass always seemed commonplace to me growing up. As though everyone had those same books and was on a similar quest: to find their authentic selves—whatever that meant. When I first picked up Robin Sharma’s book (the one about the monk), an entire world seemed to open up. A world where one could become an inspiration to millions, a spiritual deity, and the envy of unwoken people far and wide.

Since that first glimpse into the matrix of self-elevation, I’ve travelled through many wormholes of YouTube inspiration videos with ambient music and comments like: “To the person reading this, just know that you are blessed and perfect.” And when I came out, I did decide to cash in on those blessings by running off, writing poems about freedom, and hitchhiking to Panama. The problem is, now that my wanderings are over and I’ve crawled back home, I’m still not sure who I am, in spiritual parlance. After walking barefoot through many forests and refusing to buy deodorant for years, what I do know is that the path toward understanding oneself is not as clear-cut as those books first made it seem.

A few nights ago, I spoke to my friend Cameron on the phone. I wanted to ask him what it means to “know thyself.” He likes mushrooms and Eckart Tolle. One of his nicknames is Moose Legs, and he likes to say he has a big ego. He’s of the opinion that—at least where the creative process is concerned—there is no self. There is only a oneness that individuals tap into that transcends self, and that is the universal root of authentic expression. He got that from Eckart.

His theory called to mind my old roommate in Ottawa. He was a New Yorker wrapping up his Ph.D. in Philosophy. He spent hours telling me about Neoplatonism and the Trial of Socrates as I washed our dishes. One day, he came home from Kingston with a vial of DMT, and after watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker together, we tried it. A typical DMT trip lasts no more than ten minutes.

I figured I didn’t hold in the smoke long enough. When the ten minutes were up, Ben dashed out of my room in search of a pencil. He soon explained that he’d received a divine revelation: He was taken out of his body and into an ethereal sphere of what he described as “the divine brain,” where he merged and melted into exactly that oneness that Cameron was talking about. I only saw an eye set against a twirling red background and then something that resembled a vulva beckoning. I asked what we ought to do with this new and seemingly important discovery. He spoke more about Plato and Egyptian mythology until I could no longer make sense of anything. I’m still not sure how much of the trip—any trip—was purely personal and how much of it was in conversation with a transcendent intelligence, or else the refraction of some Jungian archetype. I went to bed dizzy.

~

I guess what I’m trying to say is: What does it even mean to be “authentic”? I have friends left and right who are on a quest—a grand existential adventure of finding meaning and passion and (above all) their true selves. I tend to think that we’re just the result of upbringing and culture and love, or lack thereof. Lately, I’ve been so confused about the shape of my own identity that I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t know how I feel about most things. I thought Spirited Away was “meh,” even though the correct opinion is that it’s one of the best animated films of all time. I didn’t get Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, either. Instead of falling into this same trap after I read the Tao Te Ching, I forced myself to think, “Well, that was deep.” I even posted a picture of an old wooden bench on my Instagram with the quote, “Straightforward truths seem paradoxical.” I found the bench along a quiet trail in a forest near my parents’ suburban home. My friends hearted the post and said I was well on my way to writing The Next Great Canadian Philosophy Treaty. The truth is, I didn’t glean any real insight from the sacred book. And that didn’t feel right.

As a result of my confusion, a part of me now hates seeing my twenty-something friends make posts on social media about self-growth and meaning. I can’t stand reading status updates from Antoine, a New Age hippie from Montréal that I met while planting trees. He started his own page called The Wise Apprentices (in reference to himself and his nineteen-year-old friend), where he talks about his journey toward authenticity in a tone of palpable authority. He talks about the wisdom of fire and wind and writes lazy poems about self-knowledge. It’s no secret why I dislike the posts so much. They mirror my own lack of certainty, my fear of coming off as pretentious, and all the cheap poems I wrote about freedom. They also mirror my unspoken desire to cultivate a closeness with spirituality, to fill a void.

The other day, my girlfriend asked, “Why do you still follow these people if they annoy you so much?” There was a pause. “Ah. I get it,” she said. “I have those too. Sometimes it’s nice to hate people.” She gave me a kiss and went for a run. I scrolled on.

~

Thomas is similar, in a way. His Facebook bio reads: “I believe you’re limitless.” I’ve yet to meet him in real life. He’s a cyberfriend from Denmark who added me via a mutual friend, and now, over time, I’ve become familiar with his posts—as though we really are friends.

I saw the picture of Thomas—mid-air and smiling—with his certification in hand when he became a legitimate “Life Coach.” He shares quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson and posts short, inspiring words like “Perspective / Persistence / Patience / Are what I practice.” I arranged a video call with him to see what he had to say—he who made a living off of guiding people in their lives—about what authenticity meant.

“Very good question,” he kindly answered. Sunlight beamed into his room like rays of divine inspiration. I sat in a stone basement with no window, fresh out of bed. He answered, “The more connected you are with your youngest self, the more coherent and authentic your life will become.” I didn’t get it. Not really. I saw a young me crying after my brother struck me with a water balloon when I was ten. Thomas and I went on a tangent about the inadequacy of language before he told me about a woman who broke down at the end of a Vipassana meditation retreat in Thailand. She had sobbed and said, “I’ve been piling layers and layers of dirty clothes over my inner voice for years.” I imagined a pile of sweaty undershirts and bras and a little whisper peeping through that said something along the lines of: “Your life sucks.” She listened for the first time and quit her job.

Thomas, drawing from this anecdote, defined authenticity as a state in which we find a convergence of our adult (rational) sense of responsibility and the voice of our inner (intuitive) child. When I asked him what a journey toward self would actually look like, he answered, “being vulnerable.” It struck me, parenthetically, that most self-help books conveniently tiptoed around that part in the same way that I avoided emotions out of a fear of vulnerability. Rationality is easier, a list of transformative habits instead of a confrontation with our anxieties.  Emotions linger and twist and echo. No one wants to be vulnerable, but everyone wants to grow. Perhaps I was stuck.

~

When I travelled in Thailand, a lot of people—sort of like that sobbing woman—told me about their “quest toward self”. As though there was a final destination, and it was eerily close to Bangkok. I couldn’t get enough of these deep conversations.  Before heading out to drink, Australians would tell me: “The problem is, I don’t know how to find my passion.” They envied me and my poems and asked for my trick.

I was convinced, and perhaps still am, that Bob Ross was correct when he stated that “Talent is pursued interest.” I always swapped the word talent for passion. I argued that I didn’t figure anyone was born to be a pianist any more than someone was born to become a snowplow driver. I told them, “You just choose, and you stick with it, and you reinforce the illusion that it’s the right thing. The point is, it doesn’t matter what you choose.”

Cameron and I had talked about his inability to figure out his passion once. He said that even though he’d graduated with a degree in Engineering, he never really did anything that he couldn’t equate to simply following along. His life so far had been one prolonged feat of endurance. When his dad congratulated him on his degree, he said, “I didn’t create anything new. I didn’t pour myself into what I did. I just did.” He was comfortable, but depressed.

I said, “You have a big ego. You like to make people laugh. Be a comedian.” He’s still sitting in Montréal and thinking about it. I guess it’s not that easy, either. Then again, I don’t know Cameron all that well.

~

The last song I fell in love with was Céline Dion’s “On ne change pas.” I listened to it on repeat for a few days and then got tired of listening to it on repeat for a few days. It’s about how Céline is still the same little girl who once walked through the snow of Charlemagne—skinny, worried, trembling—only buried beneath makeup and the costumes of others.

That resonated with me. Most of the time, my own trajectory feels more like a circle, like a mockery of the very notion of self-development.  It’s a strange irony that the further I get from home, the closer I feel to the child from my water balloon memories—as though the distance only accentuates the familiarity of my own inner world. As Carl Jung wrote in his autobiography, “There is no linear evolution, there is only a circumambulation of the self.” In other words, we can’t stray very far from where we began. So, where are all those self-help books leading us?

~

I don’t know the full story about Luna. I know she taught yoga, lit hula-hoops on fire, walked across India, and that now she likes living in “a functional capitalist society.” We don’t chat often. When she gets the chance, Luna enjoys telling people that they are not special. She goes into a “that’s the biggest joke of all” spiel that doesn’t really lead anywhere. Ironically, she loves Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and how magically it captures love. As though being in love is to live in limbo, in one’s very own universe. In other words, to be special.

  I know Luna got high and partied to psytrance in Bali and Goa, but I’ve only ever heard her talk about those trips with cynical self-derision. When I last spoke to her, she said that before her travels, she believed that her true self was like a buried treasure—that she just had to dig deep enough to find it. I’d come across a lot of people who felt the same way. The problem, she told me, was that the treasure kept changing.

~

Not long after I first met Luna, I attended a Rainbow Gathering in Ontario. If I was there at all, it was because I was in a process of discovering myself—in this case, my affinity to anarchy—and wanted to step out of my comfort zone. At a glance, imagine nudity, singing circles, crystal healing, and a lot of psychedelics. Rainbow Gatherings are outlandish and cult-like. They try to emulate a better society—outside of “Babylon.” People meet deep in the forest and dance and call one another brother and sister and talk about love and Mother Earth.

One day, during a talking circle around a bonfire, Philippe—who had the talking stick in hand—stated that in his dream, he had received a revelation. He discovered that his life’s true and ultimate goal was to be a guru to those who had not yet awoken. He was sixteen, short, and white. “Also,” he said, “I discovered that my real name is Tree. I won’t be using my slave-name anymore. If you could all call me Tree from now on, I would appreciate it. Much love.” He said all of this in a thick French-Canadian accent before he passed on the talking stick.

I wondered why the deity that had visited him hadn’t given him the name Arbre, considering his mother tongue very obviously was not English. I was also in the uniquely uncomfortable position of having my birth name being called a slave-name. I realized that the woman sitting next to me was called Arrow, and the guy across, Two Shoes (though he did everything barefoot). One man, who had conceived his children at a Rainbow Gathering some decades ago, gave them the names Sativa and Indica.

The gathering’s overabundance of love quickly turned into hate, and the energy got very weird very fast. I won’t go into it. What I do recall, however, is one forty-year-old guy who was able to sit with his legs crossed like Siddartha amid the chaos. His skin shone because he never ate flour, or sugar, or processed food and practiced yoga and meditation every waking hour. He was the embodiment of all those self-help books—the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari in the flesh. He won, I thought. He won the game. And that left me feeling insufficient.

I remember two things he told me. He said, “You are what you do every day,” and “Everything is love.” Though I’d heard both aphorisms many times before, they had never landed in a meaningful way. It later occurred to me that perhaps Nietzsche was right when he wrote that “Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear.” It seemed to me as though most attempts at spiritual guidance relied on the usage of symbolic structures (like language or art) to communicate intangible experiences. On that day, something about what he said resonated, as though the symbol refracted light into a part of myself that already knew what I was being told. I’d been wandering for a long time, alone. I’d slept under many bridges and wrote about the system on the broken mattress of a Bangladeshi brothel. I’d duped myself into thinking that freedom meant movement. That freedom was selfish. That misanthropy and nonconformity were the same as authenticity. At the Rainbow, though, I found a cast of kooky characters who had followed that same path only to end up in a sort of fairyland of confused yet homogenous identities. I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t feel like I fit in, either. I wanted to be that yogi, both different and perfect. I promised myself not to eat bread anymore. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have known where to go.

~

In most cases, I’ve realized, finding our true selves means some variation of drinking kombucha, doing tai chi, and quitting corporate jobs for the sake of art or travel or guru-ship or some other pure pursuit described in self-help literature. It was no coincidence that most of the people to whom I spoke at the Rainbow Gathering carried a lot of darkness and trauma within them. Many were alienated from their families and communities. It struck me then that the whole unleashing and liberation of oneself seemed to be disguised rhetoric for running away from a harmful environment. Yoga retreats and motivational speaking probably won’t open a person’s third eye, but that’s not the point. The point is that they are fire escapes and landing pads for discontent. They are somewhere else one feels called toward—as though one’s “youngest self” suddenly released a Barbaric Yawp™ that could no longer be ignored. Much like the mountains of British Columbia and the deserts of Mexico called to me in my own moments of vulnerability and frustration with society and myself.

In The Monk Who Stole a Ferrari, Sharma proposes a range of habits that will lead one to self-mastery. A condensed list might look like this: see the sunrise every morning, practice yoga, eat raw broccoli, read Rumi, and recite a mantra. No one does that long enough for it to matter, but they don’t have to, either, because the list can also be read as: one ought not to rush to work, eat fast food, watch reality TV, scroll on Facebook, and order stuff on Amazon daily. That’s the premise that sells millions because it reveals what we already know. We all know we have unhealthy habits. It’s the idea of self-elevation—of an ideal form and of an answer—that appeals to people like my parents and me. The problem is the circle of perpetual dissatisfaction that the ideal creates. A pattern emerges that can only be overcome (briefly) by buying the next book, and the next, and the next. Until entire bookshelves are filled, New York Times bestsellers are born, and little progress is made.

~

Amid the maze of Ottawa’s suburbs, the old bench that I posted on my Instagram lies tangled in a quiet and equally maze-like forest not two kilometers away from my childhood home. It was the starting point of my spiritual path. It was where I first read Thoreau and dreamt of tall mountains. When I sat on that bench as a teenager, I felt no different than when I later listened to Céline Dion, or watched Before Sunrise, or connected with a shiny yogi. My emotions, timid then forceful, would bubble up and cause a tingling warmth to settle in. Other times, like at the Rainbow, an intensely isolating or humiliating situation would seize me in the same way, prompting something darker to churn within me. In each case, time felt both suspended and fragile.

I can never predict when these sudden eclipses will arise or what circumstances might trigger them, but when they come, they often refract a piece of myself I haven’t recognized before. Like the insecurity hidden in my poems about freedom or my sincere faith in platitudes about love. When I look back at my travels, I’m inevitably drawn to these snapshots of vulnerability because these are the moments that impacted me. I believe that these are what Virginia Woolf meant when she spoke of “moments of being.”

Ever since the pandemic hit, I haven’t traveled. My quest has had to come to an abrupt end, giving me plenty of time to consider what I’ve gained from these past years. In a sense, I’ve checked all of the prescribed boxes: I read Rumi, completed a hundred-hour meditation retreat, adopted a vegan diet, and backpacked through over fifty countries. Unfortunately, none of these approaches resulted in enlightenment. 

Instead, I’m left with the conviction that Woolf’s whimsical “moments of being” are the best hints I’ll ever have at understanding who I am. Even though, after all, they provide little more than short-lived opportunities to look in a mirror. And as for the rest—the books, the quests, the meditation retreats—they’ll always be there for those who, like my family, find comfort in a linear approach to something as peripheral, evasive, and unconscious as the source and substance of self. Even if they ultimately lead us back to where we started, again and again and again.