Whatever I am spent many years in a more ignorant state than I am now experiencing.  I made a decision to work for a few years before going to college, and never made it back in any significant way.  A lot of time was given to the pursuit of whatever felt good at the time, only to arrive at the age of forty-six discovering that there was nothing that made me feel good anymore.  Everything had lost its flavor.

Arriving at this place, I thought my life was over.  There was no joy, no peace, no love, no happiness of any kind.  There was only the numbness found in the bottom of a bottle.  I prayed that God would take me in my sleep, but God selfishly let me live day after day of this torment until I could take it no more.  After discovering that I couldn't take my own life, I resolved to just give it up to someone else. 

My doctor put me in a hospital for a week, and when I came out I felt better.  But I was afraid I'd just return to the futility of all of that "programming" I'd brought on myself.  I was given the opportunity to go into several months of intensive outpatient treatment, where I learned a lot about myself.  I also joined a community of men and women who, like me, had discovered that their life wasn't worth living the way they had been living it.  They didn't want to tell me how to live mine, but they shared how they were beginning to live theirs.  It gave me strength.  It gave me hope for the first time in what seemed like centuries.

The Lotus

The lotus is a symbol for the unfoldment and awakening of spirit, the realization of God.  The lotus grows in a swamp and has its roots in the mud at the bottom of that swamp.  Yet its stalk grows up and out of the pond, and the flower blossoms without a trace of that mud from which it came.

So it is with us.  We seemingly come from a place of ignorance and filth of body and mind, and yet as we grow, we discover that our true nature isn't the filth at the bottom, but the wonder and the beauty of spirit above the surface of that pond we were immersed in.