Here ends the second week of my sixth semester at Berklee. In just two weeks, I have learned/discovered/understood so many things that, in reality, they would be enough to spend months integrating it all. That’s how intense Berklee is, and that’s how intense I am too. But the train doesn’t stop here. I still have three and a half months ahead, like a tsunami of experiences, discoveries, and lessons coming toward me.
All semesters have been like this. I’ll give a brief overview here of what each of the five tsunamis brought with their passing.
The first semester brought with it the unequivocal experience that what I truly am lies beyond the body and the mind. What I am in essence is the boundless consciousness that I share with all living beings. What I am in essence is beyond time and space. During that time, I had a series of beautiful and also tremendously disconcerting experiences of unity with everything. A great shift in perspective: I am not a man struggling against the universe, I am the universe loving a man.
The second semester had two clearly distinct halves. In the first one, I went around like a little sun. I radiated peace and joy to such an extent that people around me on the subway would start meditating and smiling with me. I made a lot of friends in those first weeks.
Then, one day, without seeing it coming, I suddenly felt a deep melancholy and a hypersensitivity that made me flee the city and seek refuge in a park. When I arrived, I didn’t find the peace I was searching for but quite the opposite. My senses began to expand so much that I felt an abyss opening beneath my feet. I had no choice but to completely surrender. In that moment, something like lightning struck me. I felt a star ignite in my abdomen and my heart crack open into the void. That night, I had a second great epiphany in which, among other things, I received a series of instructions about how my life would be from that moment on. I felt the Voice of God speaking to me through a song by Brittany Howard, which went like this:
I promise to think before I speak
To be wary of who I give my energy to
Because it is needed for a greater cause
Greater than my own pride
And that cause is to spread the enlightenment
Of love, compassion, and humanity
To those who are not touched by its light
That opening radically changed my way of perceiving the world. My senses still showed me the same as always: the everyday physical world. But my vision also awoke to an invisible field of energy in which I could see the essence of things. And behind that ocean of energy, the void. Now, instead of going around like a happy monk on the subway, I was always on the verge of tears, seeing what each person around me carried in their heart. And above all, I became aware of what I carried in my own heart, and the amount of pain accumulated there. That pain now wanted to come out, and it flowed through my chest like a river continuously for a month and a half. I found solace only in prayer and music. Here are the albums that accompanied me during that dark night (you can click on the photo to listen to them).
I also felt accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the version by Jeff Buckley. I especially understood when he sang, “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”
During that time, I considered leaving society and going to a monastery. But the answer came with the question: no, my path was to stay in society, dedicate myself to art, and start a family.
Amen.
Finally, I saw clearly that this body was mortal, and that was okay. What I truly am cannot die.
I’m still processing and integrating the second semester.
Glup.
The third semester came to the rescue. I met my qigong teacher, who is truly an enlightened man. I knew it before even starting the first class, just by sitting in his presence. As I mentioned before, my consciousness had awakened to what hippies call energies. With most people, what I perceived were clusters of emotions hard to digest. In the presence of my teacher, I felt like I was sitting on a cloud in the sky. Since then, I’ve been taking four hours of qigong with him each week, where we talk little. It’s not a theoretical class about enlightenment; it’s practical, going straight to the direct experience. One of his favorite phrases is, “Don’t believe anything I tell you.” What he teaches is a silent transmission of truth through that subtle field of energy. It was in this third semester that one day, in a solo session with him, I discovered that Christ was a living reality in my heart. That semester, I also started A Course in Miracles, a one-year course that, through the contemplation of its 365 lessons, teaches how to live in communion with Christ through forgiveness. I’m on lesson 354.
The discovery of the reality and sovereignty of Christ changes everything. Looking back at my 2023 journal, I found this entry, which reflects how my inner world was during those first months after the great discovery:
Thursday, May 25, 2023
Jesus Christ, I invoke Your presence. Guide my words so that they may be in tune with Yours. We need a language capable of opening a portal to You, even if just for a few minutes, to remember (in the sense of bringing back to the heart, reliving in the heart) the memory that what we are in essence is divine. There are wonderful books explaining different paths back to You; I do not ask for that. I ask for an art that can awaken the memory enough to resurrect a dormant curiosity. Please, Lord, use me as a vehicle of Your divine Love, as an instrument of Your Music, so that by hearing it, my brothers and sisters may look toward You and recognize themselves in that vision. Please, Lord, inspire me with songs that express the truths You have taught me, so I can share them in the most powerful way I am capable of. Dissolve the obstacles that hinder me today in developing this divine work. Sing to me, Lord.
Today I dreamed of You. I was on a tiny island, full of men chained to a wall. Before us, a turbulent sea. Then You appeared in Your form as Jesus, lifted my chains, and began walking on the waves. I followed closely, stepping on a column fallen in the sea, until we reached a stone portal. You then threw my chains with tremendous force against the rock, and the chains shattered in a great burst of light. Finally free, I followed You through the portal into the open sea.
The fourth semester brought with it a very important lesson for me. I had always been a “romantic,” in the sense that I would fall in love with one girl after another. In reality, what was happening was that my longing to merge into an eternal love was being projected onto the figure of the woman, and no woman in this world can eternally fill that infinite void. Only something equally infinite and eternal can fill it. As St. Augustine said: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
At the beginning of the fourth semester, I met B. I recognized in her the potential to form a great relationship, and I felt that my longing was finally being answered. But a month after starting our relationship, my heart guided me into a real mess. It’s a long story, but for a few days, I thought my relationship with B. was over and that God actually wanted me fully for Himself. “If You want me to become a monk, so be it.” But it seems that was not my destiny. All that turbulence served to reveal in my direct experience what I already knew intellectually: that the eternal and infallible love my soul was seeking is truly in the depths of my heart. The desire to be with someone completely vanished, and I felt an extraordinary freedom. From that freedom, B. and I came back together. Only then could I start my relationship with her with clarity: she is not my savior; she is my companion, and the savior is within both of our hearts. (This is a simplification, and it’s a beautiful topic I’d like to explore in another letter).
During that semester, I also began to recover the joy of singing, which had been lost a few years earlier under a veil of fear and illness. But now Christ was there with me in my daily life, and fear and illness cannot last long in His Presence.
The resolution came during the fifth semester. My inability to sing led me to consider abandoning my path as a musician. What’s the point of wanting to dedicate myself to singing if I can’t use my voice without hurting myself? That despair led me to ask for help (that’s the pattern, my friends: reach your limit, surrender, and find God on the other side of fear). I asked J., my qigong teacher, to help me. It took three sessions, no more than 30 minutes in total, during which, without even touching me, just projecting divine energy onto me, my voice finally opened up. I understood why A Course in Miracles was named that way. He’s done it 16 times.
That’s the last thing I feel ready to talk about. Since then, the changes and revelations have continued, but they’re still too close for me to see clearly. I only know that this semester begins with a very clear intention: the priority is to remain calm. All of the previous semesters have been extremely stressful. Now, the teaching that is opening up is the following, in the words of the French priest Jacques Philippe: “All the reasons we have for losing peace are bad reasons.” That is, there is nothing in this world that can justifiably take away our peace. The ego will resist and provide endless reasons why, in this particular case, it’s impossible to be at peace. None of those reasons are true. The solution, also in the words of Jacques Philippe (from his wonderful and short book Searching for and Maintaining Peace):
“To maintain peace in the midst of the difficulties of human existence, we have only one solution: to rely solely on God, with complete trust in Him.”
That’s the practice now. To begin cultivating the peace that transcends the world.
Amen.
With all my love,
A.
P.S. Just as I finished writing this letter, I opened my phone and found a message from a friend. He’s a personal trainer, a true master of the body. For the past few months, we’ve been meeting weekly: he teaches me how to train my body, and I teach him music and how to play the guitar. Yesterday we had a pretty deep music lesson, and today he sends me this:
“I’m realizing what you’re doing for me. You are making music come alive for me. Funny, it always sounds/feels more intense after hanging out with you. It’s becoming a very deep experience for me. In my body, and more specifically, my heart.”
The prayer I wrote last year is coming true!
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