Find The Meaning of Life. Be Your Own Monk.

By Lucio Aquerreta

 "Find the meaning, be your own monk"  invites us to to walk the path of self-knowledge and spiritual evolution, through the reencounter with the meaning of life. This book proposes a free and independent spiritual practice, which moves away from the dogmas and heavy myths of religious structures, as well as the commercialization present in the New Age culture.

As spiritual beings living a human experience, we often encounter obstacles and limitations that impede our spiritual awakening. Emotional, psychological and social factors can weigh on us and limit our ability to connect with our essence and the creative energy of the universe.

"Find the meaning, be your own monk" provides us with tools to find wisdom and understanding, as well as to express love in all areas of life, in accordance with the will of creation. Through the practice of ancient exercises, such as meditation, we can reach sublime states of spiritual awareness, useful to control those negative aspects that our mind tends to generate.

In these pages you will find a path to experiencing true happiness based on meaning by becoming your own disciple and your own monk. If you are looking to develop a deeper connection with your spirituality and find purpose, "Find Meaning, Be Your Own Monk" is a valuable guide that will lead you to the realization of your spiritual potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucio Aquerreta
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223693987

Book preview

Chapter one

Love as meaning.

What the universe expects from you.

Introduction.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion (in ecstasy), Rumi.

You know, a lot of time has passed and a lot has happened to us. Throughout our spiritual history we have created an infinity of gods and religions; some very superficial and others persevering in time, most of them functional, designed according to the needs and interests of people -or at least some of them-. Perhaps because of this practicality and functionality of religions we have forgotten to look for divinity in the most obvious place where we could find it: within ourselves.

Part of our problem lies in living without sincerely questioning the meaning of life. When we ask this question, many answers include the fuzzy hope that there is a divinely predetermined plan and we fantasize about the presence of an omnipotent god who teaches lessons and imparts rewards and punishments.

However, the creative force of the whole is a flowing energy and - no matter how much we may want to believe otherwise - unfortunately there is not and never was a predetermined plan for our lives.

If we intuit that the creation of the whole has meaning and that this meaning is related to love, we should not forget that human beings, at least in part, by abandoning the cycle of nature's rigid laws of survival, find ourselves in a privileged situation to give shape to its manifestation.

Our sensitivity, intelligence, capacity to create and to generate loving actions, allow us to carry out this task.

We know that the first cultural expressions, represented in paintings, petroglyphs or sacred stones, respond to those spiritual practices that accompanied us from the very beginning of time.

With successes and errors, our relationship with spirituality occupied a central place in everyday life.

So much so that, for most of us, it was inconceivable to spend too much time without thinking, feeling, or being immersed in the divine.

Through prayers, dances, songs or meditations, in different cultures the connection with the divinity was expressed daily; and when not, in many others, spiritual practice was exercised in almost every act of life: dreaming, walking, hunting, observing the flight of birds, the sounds of the night, almost every event was experienced as an expression of the divinity.

There is a range of different religious practices, with billions of people subscribing to one or another: by tradition, because of family mandates, as a means of agglutination or social insertion, or simply delegating the responsibility for their spiritual evolution - for many amid doubts and little certainty - to the religious authorities.

Beyond all criticism, we cannot ignore that some people, through religious practices, have managed to connect with their essence and with the creative energy of the whole -be it God, Allah, Krishna or Buddha-; beyond the limitations of these institutions.

But why, in order to experience our spirituality, should we get involved in organizations -in many cases, with dark histories, greedy for money or power?

Why should we entrust our spiritual development, the most transcendental act of our lives, to conditioning institutions?

Even today, in part of the world we live under old dogmatic religious and cultural anchors that do not respect rights and freedoms, and keep us away from love, while in developed and developing countries many people focus their lives on consumption, distraction and social climbing to the detriment of an affective and spiritual life.

In the West, the crisis of traditional religions, as a result of the vertiginous social and cultural transformations, has created an opportunity for the emergence of a new, free and independent spirituality, in line with the rationality and ideas of our own time, far removed from the old myths and dogmas. After all, it is inherent to human nature to evolve and seek to manifest its essence beyond the circumstances in which it has lived.

Love is the essence of the human being and of the universe, and it is precisely what gives meaning to life through relationships - both personal and social. However, we are often not prepared to manifest our loving essence due to various factors that limit our ability to manifest it. From childhood, layers of conditioning and duties are imposed on us that turn us into limited social and cultural beings.

In reading these pages you will find some tools that will help you connect with love and the meaning of life. If we can achieve a certain degree of spiritual awareness through ancient practices such as meditation or spiritual chanting, acquire wisdom and understanding about how we and the world work, simplify our lifestyle and let go of many of the conflicts and superficialities that surround us, we can surely find the necessary spaces to more easily express our loving essence and live a fuller and happier life, based on meaning.

What do we do?

Almost all of us humans behave as if death were nothing more than a groundless rumor, Aldous Huxley.

We live in the illusory world, where we were indoctrinated and conditioned, told what to do for thousands of years, they insisted to exhaustion that this or that was the only valid spiritual path; but the reality is that in intimacy we were always free, and this is our time and this is our life, and, beyond all myths or beliefs, we have every right to dig inside ourselves and find meaning in our existence. Our life, our responsibility!

Concentrate for a moment: you are living your life as we all do; with ups and downs, with projects, with affection -maybe with love?-, maybe suffering some frustrations. There are hundreds of details, routines, distractions, hobbies and sports, social networks, internal debates; also satisfactions and worries of the most varied -for money, for well-being, for the future-. Tangled in daily soap operas: what he said, what he didn't say, what maybe.

According to various publications, it is estimated that our brain can generate, with its more than 86,000 million cells, at least 60,000 thoughts a day; 95% of which arise automatically. Most of them are negative, repetitive or useless; our mind can even develop suicidal or homicidal thoughts more often than might be acceptable.

In our complex and formidable mind there are thousands of automatic mechanisms, so complex that they can make us doubt whether there really is a self with the capacity to decide for itself. Should be, social mandates, the ego, our unconscious taking command of decisions, mechanisms that affect us deeply such as the denial of our own death. We live far from the idea of our temporality, of our mortality - even if there is absolutely irrefutable evidence about it.

But how could we even think about the meaning of life if we deny mortality? How much of our precious time do we devote to something as important as our spirituality? In better or worse ways, we are ultimately living attached to what we can and in the desired assurance that tomorrow the sun will rise again. But the truth is that our biological clock is ticking and, sooner or later, time is running out.

The truth is that time and life is what we have today and now, and if you ever imagined that human life can have a transcendence beyond the everyday, perhaps this is an opportunity to reflect. Think about the illogicality of human behavior in general, which only wonders about the meaning of life when it no longer has time to live it.

Now we will do an exercise, a simulation: try to experience deeply and as something real that we are about to face the worst; we are informed that, for some reason, we only have a few days left, maybe, with luck, a few weeks to live. Please take the time to imagine this unreal situation as if it were real. Are you ready?

When faced with an extreme situation, we are likely to experience the greatest emotional cataract of our lives: fear of the unknown, of what we might find after death; anger at the loss of what is ultimately the most precious thing we possess: our existence; feelings of guilt for things we could have done better or for the pain we have caused others; regret for the wrong decisions we have made; perhaps anxiety or depression.

What did you find? It is very likely that we ask ourselves if what we have lived has been worthwhile, if we have used the time that life has given us in a good way. Perhaps we try to dust off fragments of some rusty religion, covered by dust for lack of use; perhaps, in those few days we try to find answers to the meaning of life. But is it necessary to go to the extreme of facing the end to question the meaning? Is it not wiser to explore our spirituality before it is too late?

It is better to ask ourselves now about the meaning of life, rather than when we are pressed by difficulties or in near-death situations.

There is always the danger that some religion will offer you the solution to your problem, that it will involve some financial contribution on your part, or that you will be forced to accept this or that authority, or myths and fantasies contrary to your logic and rationality. Fortunately, at this moment you have the opportunity to find a sincere answer by looking within yourself. Here, in these pages, we share some reflections on spirituality, with no other interest than to accompany you in the search for meaning, beyond the mundane and superficial.

Castaways and Orphans.

The more the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the way to genuine religiosity lies not in the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through the effort of rational knowledge, Albert Einstein.

We are on a small planet, our body is largely composed of microbes and bacteria, and our existence has a limited time. Without clear answers, our life could be compared to that of a shipwrecked person, without our being able to understand why we are living. Part of life is spent in an endless number of acts without spiritual meaning, distracting us and distancing us from our deepest sensibility, frantically pursuing happiness and taking distance from everything that can cause us pain; orphans of an illusory god in which less and less people believe.