Towards the Depths
"Whoever loses his life will find it."
— Jesus
If we were the ocean, we could say that we spend most of our lives at the surface of ourselves, where storms rage and waves clash against one another.
Our problem is not the ebbs and flows of the surface, but the fact that we are so absorbed in them that we hardly ever notice what lies beneath.
There is much more to life than "me," "my story," my hopes and my suffering. In reality, we are far vaster than we ever imagined.
But that vastness is of an entirely different nature than the surface. The surface belongs to form; the depths belong to essence.
Essence knows nothing of the duality of highs and lows, gain and loss, success and failure, and thus remains completely untouched by anything that happens at the surface.
From the depths, storms still arise, but they are seen for what they are: passing appearances that come and go without affecting the nature of the ocean itself.
That kind of peace cannot be attained by resisting the storm or waiting for it to pass. It has nothing to do with the weather at all.
It is present regardless, at all times and in every circumstance.
Why, then, can we not live from that peace, speak from that peace, love from that peace?
In a sense, we already do. Everything, without exception—every thought, every feeling, every perception, every movement of life—arises from it.
The only thing that obscures this is the person who longs for that peace and wants to make it his own.
The person is the wave asking, "How do I become the ocean?"—not realizing that its very existence is borrowed entirely from the ocean.
As long as there is the belief that something needs to be found, attention remains fixed at the surface, upon the imagined absence.
Letting go of the story, the wounds, and the expectations is not annihilation. It is sinking back into the heart of existence. It is looking past the wave and realizing that all there is is ocean.
The person we identify with belongs only to the surface. It is a flat image cast upon the water by memory, belief, conditioning, and trauma.
What is lost is an image.
What is found is the depth that was there before it, beneath it, around it, and has never once ceased to be our reality, our true home.
IMF - Luang Prabang, Laos, 4 July 2026
