Ra Collective: At the monastery, we were told,

Choose one word from the Gospel,

And live according to it.

I chose truth, and that was my leitmotif.

I vowed to follow the truth wherever it leads me.

Ra’Sha, help me write about this.

After you leave the monastery, you continued on that path.

The first realization came when you went to Church to pray.

That was when the first and most important truth hit you.

“God is still with me. I still have God.”

You said, on leaving the Church.

The nuns had led you to believe, on leaving the monastery,

You left God and would lose God.

That, you were choosing a path of your own making.

Which would not lead you to your salvation.

That experience proved them wrong.

You moved on, armed with that truth.

The most important truth because with it,

You were able to weather almost everything.

Then you encountered what podcast Andre Dugum aptly put as.

“Having an ego about how you don’t have much ego.”

For you, it was experiencing pride at being less proud.

You beat that with the thought.

Truth would beat out that pride also and come out victorious.

Truth for you became mostly embarking on knowing yourself.

You dissected yourself mercilessly,

Everytime, you saw something about yourself,

Usually negative, you faced it head on and worked with it,

You did not even know until recently that,

That work has a name to it, “shadow work.”

You assimilate, Taoism, Buddhism, The Law of one,

And recently Hindu Mysticism to your path.

Now you are on the path of complete truth.

You stand in truth not, only concerning yourself,

But as you are on your spiritual path.

You stand in all honesty and transparency before God.

Those with such transparency do not fear anything.

For the one reason they are transparent.

They have nothing to hide.

Nothing lurking in their shadow.

It did take a lifetime of work.