The Journey Continues!
When my father shared the intimate details of his life story and quest to heal, he hoped that his personal journey would inspire more open-minded inquiry about what it means to be human. The purpose of his book, he said repeatedly, was just as much about raising questions as it was about giving answers.
“The most important thing I have ever done,” he wrote,“ is become an explorer of my mind and heart. I got to know myself as I really am, rather than who I imagined myself to be. No one else could have deciphered the subtleties of my own mind. No one else could have faced my repressed emotions, heartbreaks, and fears.”
My father would be thrilled to know that our project isn’t ending with the publication of his book—that the Quest for Eternal Sunshine website will be an ongoing legacy devoted to sharing resources that help cultivate wisdom, healing and self-discovery.
One of my father’s central areas of focus was the observation of the human mind and the manner in which our beliefs are formed. He realized how dysfunctional it is to consider our beliefs to be facts when in truth they are totally arbitrary—determined by the particular culture we were raised in, and the day and age in which we live. Those arbitrary thoughts, he maintained, often trap us in a deep-rooted cycle of fear and pain.
“For more than fifty years,” he wrote, “Thinking never helped me solve the problems that stood in the way of my happiness. As long as I continued to glorify my brain instead of learning to rise above my mechanical conditioning, I couldn’t choose love over fear, or freedom over slavery.”
My father wrote about a moment he recognized the essence of his “true Self,” at an unexpected time and place: a casino in Reno. While gambling one afternoon, he inadvertently caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and saw a person who looked like him, but was very different from the person he perceived himself to be. “The only way to describe it,” he wrote, “is that I became conscious of the fact that I am indeed a Self—a word that is still difficult for me to adequately explain. The Self I had just discovered transcended my proud little ego. No one could injure it or make it lose its equilibrium…It didn’t experience fear, or share my needs, drives, or apprehensions…It had no wants besides just what is. Equanimity was its natural state of being.”
My father maintained that when we learn to let go of our pride and ego, the only thing we lose are our chains. Gaining this awareness was an essential step in his process of self-liberation.
The journey continues!
Myra
