Searching for the Lost Smile

By Lazar Trifunović

Searching for the Lost Smile recounts a journey of self-discovery and personal growth undertaken by the author in an attempt to transform his life from a state of chaos to a state of equilibrium.

It is a story of a qualified doctor who, disappointed in the powers of conventional medicine to help him deal with his own troubles, sets out to investigate healing methods used in different cultures across the globe.

His journey takes him to unusual places, some hidden and remote, miles off the beaten track, others visited by millions in some of the largest gatherings on Earth.

He is a witness to exorcism rituals in the caves of Ethiopia, experiences shamanic rituals in Peru and spends time in the hospital for lepers in Varanasi.

But in search of his true self he also journeys into the depths of his own being.

He discovers peace and tranquillity of Zen gardens in Japan and the emptiness of the American dessert. He learns humility in the rarefied atmosphere of Kathmandu. He encounters Yoga and Homeopathy in India and the spiritual healing through psychosynthesis at the Re-Vision College in London.

This is the story of these two parallel journeys and the lessons they bring forth as they are finally made to converge.
Whether travelling inwardly or outwardly, the experience proved rich in insights and revelations, with gleaming nuggets of wisdom often found in most unexpected places...

This book can help us realise that there is much more to life than being comfortable, entertained and having material possessions. It aims to nourish the soul and, for those who learn to read the signs by the road, it can provide motivation to embark on their own quest of self-discovery.

Illustrated with photographs taken during author’s travels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lazar Trifunović
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9788691871710

Book preview

PACKING FOR THE JOURNEY

I was in the final year of medical school in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia and the town of my birth, when one day I found myself talking to a group of fellow students in the faculty.

One of the girls asked if anyone knew what to do if someone suddenly falls unconscious. She was concerned that, even at this late stage in qualifying to be a doctor, she did not know the correct procedure to apply in such a situation.

That was perhaps the first time that I realised that nothing we were learning was teaching us about life, about real life. Nothing addressed the questions of what life is, why we have consciousness, nothing explained the reason for our being here. What is the point of life? Does it have a purpose? Could eating, sleeping, acquiring things and spending time as comfortably as we can really be all there is to it? From that moment on, such questions began to preoccupy my mind, appearing uninvited, out of nowhere, to torment me.

The interesting thing was that, the moment I started considering these questions seriously, the answers begun to materialise in the most mysterious way. It took me a while to realise that the answers did not just appear, that they were actually engendered by my persistent search for them, despite the huge effort, inner struggle and suffering it entailed. Whatever the reason, the answers did come. They were not always clear, but clear enough to spur my search.

I frequently made errors along the way and they slowed my progress, even pushed me back a few steps. But I quickly learned that my failings, dead-ends, confusion and the various psychological crises I was experiencing were a natural, integral part of a search of this kind. I also realised that each time I managed to overcome an obstacle, I gained understanding of a new dimension of life. In such moments, I would glimpse previously unimaginable planes of existence, so magnificent that I was left in no doubt that the difficult periods those striving for meaning inevitably face are worthwhile and deserve full attention and respect. It is precisely these periods of hardship that open new perspectives on life. It is through these that we obtain subtle knowledge and arrive at our most profound realisations.

In undertaking this daring adventure, it is of vital importance to adopt a correct attitude to life, particularly to its negative aspects. We should not view difficult situations as something to be avoided at all costs, and we should certainly never see ourselves as victims of such situations. We should not think: ‘…poor me, everything happens to me…why me?’ The question ‘why me’ is the right one to ask, but our attitude to it must change. We should take each difficult situation as an opportunity to learn, a lesson that life generously puts before us in the form of a challenge that needs to be overcome. This is the correct context in which to ask: Why is this happening to me? What have I done to provoke this and what can I learn from it? What should I change to stop this from happening again? These are the questions we should think through when confronted with a difficult situation of any kind.

In order to progress along a spiritual path it is also crucially important that, when faced with complications, we take responsibility for the situation, for our circumstances and by extension, for our own lives. Most people find this particularly challenging. Yet we have to realise that we alone are responsible for everything that happens to us. Blaming someone else, as is our inclination, is seemingly an easy way out of a difficult situation. But in blaming others for our unfulfilled ambitions, we embrace the role of the victim and miss the opportunity to learn and move forward. We lose the ability to give direction to our lives, to be masters of our own fate. Instead, we surrender to the turmoil of life, like a leaf torn from the tree by strong gales, unable to influence them in any way. Blaming others resolves nothing. In fact, it usually makes things worse. Life begins to unravel and soon, nothing is the way we want it to be.

On the other hand, if we take responsibility for our actions and seize the reins of destiny in our own hands, life begins to unfold differently. It becomes possible to view our lifetime as a series of experiences we have no choice but to go through, but which also offer us a precious opportunity to learn. Then we can use the knowledge we acquire to make changes that reveal themselves as necessary in the process of attaining it. That is how we can control our destiny. Not in a sense that we can do the impossible, foresee the future or know what is going to happen, but in the sense that we start to accept everything that happens to us as a natural part of life, as the very fabric of life. If we succeed, rather than being a source of fear, anguish and frustration, our life experiences turn into a treasured guide which has the power to help us learn and move forward. If we adopt this attitude and face our problems, we have a fighting chance of attaining our ambitions and fulfilling our dreams and desires.

What happened to the dreams of your youth? Have you fulfilled any of them? I feel I am living mine and that is what I would like to share with you. In writing this book I hope to help you do the same.

I firmly believe that every life experience we take head-on and accept for what it is, be it good or bad, brings us a step closer to achieving harmony with the Universe. An experience can appear positive or negative only in relation to our limited understanding. Observed from a wider perspective, our life experiences are neither good nor bad – they are simply that which one has to deal with, and that is different for each person. Those experiences we accept and live through fully help us tune into the rhythm of the Universe. That is what experiences are for.

If we view energy as the basis of all things, we can clearly perceive that the Universe has its own rhythm. By Universe I mean everything in creation, including that which lies outside the human experience. Energy is never static – it is dynamic, it oscillates at a particular frequency and creates a flow, a rhythm. By contrast, we struggle unevenly through life, there is always something holding us back. We invariably come up against obstacles. Life does not roll along effortlessly and most things we do have a tendency to get complicated. But that is exactly what happens if we reject certain experiences life puts in front of us, because in our minds we label them as bad. On the other hand, if we accept whatever life throws at us, we fall in step with the rhythm of the Universe and life changes. Things begin to flow, everything becomes much easier and inexplicably, life starts placing in front of us precisely what we need. We start living our dreams and desires.

True, life is a mystery, difficult for our mind to grasp. A day filled with pleasures and entertainment can make it appear perfectly agreeable, but there is much more to life than spending time doing the things we enjoy. If we want to reach for everything life has to offer, we must recognise that we need negative experiences as well as positive. After all, virtue does not exist independently of sin. We should constantly remind ourselves that good and evil, night and day, forgiveness and revenge, hot and cold – are but halves of one intrinsic whole. Two sides of a coin, heads and tails. It is impossible to separate them, to accept one and reject the other. Moreover, to do it just because the mind prefers pleasant life experiences and labels only those as ‘normal’ and acceptable. To accept negative experiences unconditionally is to accept life in all its complexity. Ultimately, none of us is half a person and we must understand life as being equally all-encompassing. Once we can do that, new planes of existence gradually begin to reveal themselves. If we widen our perspective, it becomes possible to see bad experiences as a positive force in life. If we accept them as equally worthy and significant as the positive, they can serve as a springboard to help us break through to a new, different reality. As much as happiness and joy are integral to life, so grief and sorrow are there to enable us to understand it fully. When we do, life gives us its all.

So, to get in tune with the Universe, fulfil the dreams of our youth and give meaning to our lives we first need to accept life fully and take responsibility for everything that happens to us. After all, even a musical genius like Mozart would find it difficult to produce a beautiful melody on a piano which is out of tune.

THE CRISIS PRECEDING SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

"Tao (The Way) can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao.

Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name."

Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

Journey into the unknown - Sahara, Mauritania

Journey into the unknown – Sahara, Mauritania

ILLNESS

The reason I decided to go travelling was to discover the various methods of healing used in different parts of the world. My aim was not to write an academic paper on the subject, I did not plan it as a research trip. I set off simply in search of a cure for my own ills. After finishing medical school, I found myself in such appalling psychological state I can hardly describe the turmoil I was in. My life was unravelling. Modern medicine offered no explanation for my predicament, it could not provide solutions nor did it hold out hope for the future. My situation seemed utterly desperate. To make matters worse, I realised I was not alone in going through such crises. We all experience periods of upheaval in the course of our lives, without knowing why they happen. But life crises have a raison d’être, they have a purpose. I now believe this difficult period to have been a defining moment in my development – the crisis that precedes spiritual awakening.

Most people spend little time thinking about the meaning and the purpose of life, instead devoting themselves to pleasures, to fulfilling personal desires, indulging their senses and satisfying their ambitions. If they are a bit more mature, they may be able to put family and social obligations before personal desires. Believing the physical world to be the only reality there is, they attach themselves to material possessions and ascribe them positive values. This way of life is an end in itself, so the average person usually fears death and strives to delay his or her departure from the world for as long as possible.

However, sometimes an individual can experience certain inner changes, and these can be very unsettling. Such crises can arise in anyone’s life, but they can also help us turn towards spirituality. In fact, they often signify the beginning of a person’s spiritual journey. That is why Dr Assagioli calls them ‘crises preceding spiritual awakening’. One can enter a crisis following a period of stress, of emotional and mental anguish brought on by financial problems, failed friendships, loss of loved ones or other frustrations. A crisis can also occur without an obvious reason.

These inner changes often start with feeling unhappy, as if something one cannot quite put a finger on is missing. This is usually accompanied by a sense of emptiness encroaching on daily life, as what used to fulfil us no longer seems able to. Ordinary things lose significance and new problems begin to occur. At this point we usually start to question the purpose of life. We doubt things we once took for granted, without giving them a second thought. These states are often dealt with the wrong way. People struggle against them, yearning to get back to ‘normal’, but ‘normal’ seems to slip further away no matter what they do. In this situation people often turn to physical activities for release. They take up a sport or a hobby, looking for new stimuli, chasing new sensations and although this can alleviate the problem to some extent, it cannot solve it. The distress of a crisis like this becomes ever more painful, while the feeling of inner emptiness becomes unbearable. The values that had upheld one’s life disappear. There is no light and, to make matters worse, the person in this situation often truly believes there will never be light again.

Often, this is the point at which people seek professional help. But once they realise that conventional medicine does not have a solution, they turn to psychotherapists or medical practitioners who use some holistic techniques in their work. Prompted by the widely accessible literature of popular psychology, they may also look to spiritualists and various new-age teachers and healers. They try many things, but the answers are not easy to come by. A proliferation of books and healers, with their promises of lives changed in ten days, certainly provides no answers. The crisis deepens.

People commonly experience new emotions too, as feelings that had never troubled them previously suddenly come to the fore. This is a result of conscience awakening and with it the sense of responsibility. Feelings of guilt and remorse can become persistent, and this can push a challenging situation into a crisis. Naturally, people have different experiences and react differently while navigating through this process. Some are burdened by guilt, some are troubled by suspicions, some fret over material things, while others are most preoccupied with different emotional states and other metaphysical and moral dilemmas.

Dr Assagioli suggested that crises like these present themselves similarly to neuroses and borderline personality disorders. In many cases, various physical ailments occur in the scope of the illness. It is fair to say that if a physician you see has no direct experience of this state, he or she will not be able to see beyond the symptoms and understand what is going on with you, because this is not something one learns in medical school. In cases like this, conventional therapies only make the situation worse, regardless of whether the state resembles neurosis or manifests as a physical ailment. Conventional therapies may be able to alleviate some of the symptoms, but that is far from being able to resolve the problem.

What is more, this removal of symptoms or the attempts to suppress them can actually make matters worse, because it is through them that the vital force, our life energy, tries to work things out and moderate our inner state. Symptoms can be understood simply as valves that relieve inner anguish. If we block them, we block the process of spiritual growth. This is bound to produce further complications later when, depending on the primary focus of the crisis, they can manifest as affecting the psyche or the physical body.

From the point of view of holistic medicine, we are energy. A term for energy which represents our essence commonly used in my profession, homeopathy, is the ‘vital force’. The vital force has three manifestations on three different levels. On the mental plane, the vital force manifests as thoughts, on the emotional plane as emotions, and on the physical plane as the body. Together, these make an individual. We know that human beings are much more complex than this simplified outline suggests, but this description is offered only as an aid to understanding how we function.

When the vital force is in equilibrium it manifests as perfect health on the mental, emotional and physical level. Any disruption of the vital force affects each of these three levels. Those changes are what conventional medicine defines as disease, particularly if manifested on the physical plane. In holistic medical systems, illness is always seen as a disorder of energy, a disturbance of the vital force, while everything else is a consequence or a manifestation of it. The occurrence of symptoms in the physical body represents nothing more than the shifting of the disorder from Man’s central part, his vital force, to a less important, peripheral part of him. Symptoms are an integral part of the process of the vital force healing itself; they are in fact helping to alleviate our inner state. Conventional therapies often block this process, which leads to complications in the form of side-effects, or negative reactions to treatments.

The balance of the vital force can be disturbed not only by different pathogens and negative outside influences, but also by its own development. Observed from the outside, consolidation and expansion of the vital force is perceived as spiritual growth of the person. Inner changes that take place in the course of this process can outwardly appear very similar to what we consider disease in the conventional sense.

We fear illness to the point that we are reluctant to talk about it, and we often shy away from sick people. Illness itself is misunderstood in modern medicine and by extension, in the whole of the Western civilisation. However, in India I learnt to look at illness differently.

There is a definition of illness that states:

Illness is a mechanism that forces change.

What this means is that when unwell, we should not despair at illness, but rather use it to take a look at our lives, examine them truthfully and try to resolve the errors we identify, because that is what made us ill in the first place.

‘But isn’t it all down to genes?’ I hear you asking. Here I have to disappoint you – blaming genetics is no longer an acceptable defence. The impact of our predecessors is evident and should not be ignored, but it does not change the fact that we alone are responsible for our lives. Epigenetics, the branch of genetics that emerged recently, established that genes are not something fixed and predetermined as previously thought, but that each gene carries thousands of possibilities within it. Which of them will manifest depends on a multitude of external factors, but for the most part, it depends on us, on what we do.

If this is properly understood, it becomes clear that, when we are sick, in addition to applying the usual medical treatments we also need to work on ourselves and make some changes. That is the road that leads to health. The problem is that ‘working on ourselves’ requires a huge effort. It involves suffering and hard work, and that is something most people are unwilling to take on.

So, instead of regarding sickness as some random predicament, we should see it as a warning that there is something we are doing wrong, that there are things we must change. Life crises can be understood in the same way.

Such approach to illness is not unique to India. It also exists in Christianity. Jean Claude Larchet writes about it in his Theology of Illness. I came across a book called Illness, a Visitation from God in a monastery in Serbia, which treats disease in much the same way. These books suggest that illness is a consequence of sin. They postulate that, although there are myriad adverse factors affecting our health and although countless people fall ill, there are still those who never do so. It follows that the underlying cause of illness cannot be fully explained by adverse external factors alone. In the Christian tradition, the fundamental origin of illness can be found at a much deeper level – in sin. Sin disrupts the harmony between the body and the soul. This makes the body weak, prone to illness and open to negative outside influences. Sin poisons the soul, and the sickness of the soul is transferred to the body. It is interesting to note that the founder of homeopathy, Dr Hahnemann, thought along the same lines, writing that diseases emerged as a consequence of humanity moving away from God, leaving us susceptible to negative influences. Similarly, according to Christian holy men, sickness is a time of God’s visitation. Illness comes to chastise us, to jolt us into realisation that we must act to cleanse ourselves of passion in order to prevent a greater calamity. Illness turns us to God and makes us feel closer to Him. In any case, as illness affects the entire being, it often drives the person to examine their life and reassess their goals in life.

It follows that it is possible to see illness as a spiritual experience. If we take that approach, periods of sickness become a significant part of our spiritual journey. I do not mean to say that to embark on a spiritual journey one must first fall ill, but that how we view illness is important. Taking illness as something antagonistic that happens only to our physical body and ascribing to it negative connotations can only make things worse for a person already weakened by illness. The negative emotions generated in this way – feelings of anxiety, anger, agitation and despair – help accelerate progress of the disease and impede that person’s return to health. By contrast, if we regard illness as a spiritual experience we generate positive, optimistic feelings. If we believe that illness is a part of our spiritual development, that it represents life challenging us and giving us the opportunity to grow, then the prognosis is much better. Such an attitude is conducive to healing and accelerates it.

Everything that has so far been said about illness is also true of life crises. After all, a person feels rather poorly during a crisis – they are ill in the conventional sense of the word.

The first thing I did when I arrived at the leper hospital in Varanasi was to ask if they could explain what leprosy is. Medical schools in the West do not teach about it because it has been eradicated in Europe. The answer I got was straightforward, yet intriguing. They said that in order to understand leprosy or any other disease, I first had to understand life in different terms to those used in the West. I needed to broaden my horizons. At the time, I found this response baffling, but now I understand what they meant – that the way people think about illness in the West is quite superficial, quite shallow, and that in truth we know next to nothing about it.

THE LOST SMILE

Leaving Novi Sad after I finished medical school was essentially my first attempt at resolving the crisis I was going through. I had spent years immersed in the study of conventional medicine, the scientific approach to healing which had made such astonishing strides in the course of the 20th century, but it could not help me. On the face of it, I had it all – I was surrounded by family and friends, I spent time reading, discussing philosophy and the arts, going to parties, having lovers, roaming the streets, travelling… but still, all that was not enough. It was not enough to allow me a simple smile at the start of each day, and it was completely inadequate for reaching that morning smile’s elusive source: inner peace.

My inner turmoil grew ever more frantic, until it threatened to extinguish the Being I had barely begun to discern inside me. I still do not know where this notion of a Being inside me came from, but once I caught a glimpse of it, I became convinced that I should help it to grow, to mature and to realise itself fully. Looking back, it was this birth and development of my Being, which came out of the suffering and anguish I was experiencing, that gradually opened doors to a new perception of reality. I also know now that the Being is not inside me, it is me. Our wrong identification with the physical body and with material reality makes us neglect our Being, and so prevents it from full realisation. Identifying with things outside ourselves keeps us enslaved in one-dimensional reality by creating the illusion that the pleasures of the material world are all we can have. This prevents us from gaining insight into other dimensions of life.

At the time, I knew nothing about crises or how to deal with them, so I set off in search of a remedy for my troubles. I wanted to rein in the restlessness raging inside me and break out of the cycle of despair. I wanted to regain the smile I had lost. I set off on a journey around the world without the slightest suspicion that I was at the same time starting a journey to the depths