We cannot achieve personal enlightenment – a clarification of our souls – until we cease deluding ourselves. We must accept that life includes witnessing and personally experiencing pain.

It is ultimately the ebony of our pain, our blackest monuments, which lead us to seek an enlightened way of living. We are unable to hear the voice leading to our own salvation until we fall into the depths of an abbess manufactured by living a heedless life. From this state of floundering in the gloomy lagoon, we can awaken to find the light bearing the seeds of truth that will redeem us. Looking inward, we overcome stubborn resistance, and we revivify long lost and forgotten powers. The experience of soul-searching perspicacity transfigures us. We might even feel as if we died a spiritual death and then we were reborn. From our dark pit, a shaft of light emerges.

Life flows at ease whenever a person ceases complaining about the past, worrying about the future, lives in the now without resisting pain, and accepts the moral sublimity of living in a state of grace.

The road to enlightenment requires a life dedicated to self-study, accepting the minor tragedies of life as an ineluctable part of the human condition.

An enlightened person strives to live a meaningful life, defined by their personal humility joy, passion, and profound reverence for life.

We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to life’s tragic beauty.