The past year has been difficult. Old fears and anxieties have roared to life with a vengeance. Work has dried up. Focus on anything outside of the spiritual journey has become an impossibility.

In days past, I’d have sought an end to the fears and anxieties. I’d have tried to avoid them, to overcome them, to power through them.

But now, mercifully, disturbingly, there is a recognition that I, of my own self, cannot slay these demons because I AM these demons – they are baked into my DNA, into the fabric of my being. I can no more vanquish a lifelong fear than I can change my height.

There is relief in this recognition, because it reminds me that the fear is inherited, not some character fault, weakness of personality, or personal failing. It tells me that all the years of therapy and new-age treatments and avoidance that bought me time were never going to fix what ailed me.

But in this recognition also comes a new fear, one born of the knowledge that the only true path out of fear and anxiety is through the discovery of my True Self, the recognition of God at the center of my being. Doug must die if the Absolute is to be revealed.

The sages tell us that a life without God at its center is a life wasted; that a life without God at its center is ‘a branch cut off from the tree, doomed to whither and die.’ That certainly feels right to me now.

It’s evident that the pleasures I long sought were ephemeral at best, time (life)-wasting at worst. The best experience is always just that, an experience, something that comes and goes. I – all of us – lead lives of quiet desperation, frantically pursuing the good stuff while swimming in a tempest suffering (‘life is suffering’).

So now there is only one goal: the Absolute, the Knowing, the Understanding, God. I want to reach that high place where, if this mouth opens, there is no ‘me’ behind the words, no doubts, no worries or concerns. For whatever time I have left in this realm, I yearn for the ‘peace that surpasses understanding.’

Will it be found in this life? In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus urges us to seek until we find, promising that when we find we will rule over the All. But there’s no secret recipe for making that happen, no road map.

Obviously, there is no way of knowing what awaits. What is known, however, is that this life no longer offers anything that truly satisfies or ever will satisfy. (I say that as a man madly in love with his wife, his children, his dog.)

Yet none of it is enough, none of it is what is sought.