Letter From a Dharma Bum

From the Beginning ...

Dear Q,

I think it’s important to start at the beginning and tell you why and how my spiritual journey began.

There is something important about beginnings but I’m not quite sure what it is.

Perhaps, it’s because beginnings set the trajectory which tells us something about the destination..

It’s at the beginning that we find out why someone took the journey in the first place.

The reason I wanted to become enlightened was anything but a romantic notion.

It had nothing to with lessening the suffering in the world.

It was fear.

It was about saving myself from going to hell. In those days, hell was a place that was a lot worse than prison.

But aside from trying to escape the clutches of the devil - what sparked my desire to become enlightened was ‘Demain’, a coming-of-age novel by Herman Hesse.

The book parelled my own life at that time. It’s about a young man from the middle class who struggles towards self-awareness.

In his journey of self-discovery the young man departs from social conventions in search of spiritual fulfillment, which mirrored what I did - eventually.

Over the years I have read many books but Demain is the only one in which I experienced an epiphany while reading it.

The experience was frightening and yet exhilarating - like suddenly finding myself stand on the edge of a precipice.

What made the novel easy to relate to was that it was autobiographical - not something made out thin air.

I believe that in today’s world, if someone were to have the same desire I had then, instead of reading a book they probably would buy a pair of Lululem yoga pants and do whatever two hundred dollar yoga pants make you do.

I know it sounds cynical but that’s the kind of world we live today. We have become more cynical since the pandemic and I’m afraid it seems to be getting only worse.

AXZ 06.21.26