Those were the words describing the reason I wanted to join the course. When I learned about this program I didn't fully understand the content of it. Was it meditation? Was it therapy? What the heck is an Energy Attunement? I just felt that the target of this program is to introspect and understand your deeper beliefs. Those thoughts that influence the way you perceive the world and they are not accessible just by logic. Intuition is the key. When I joined the program I had serious issues of motivation to work and I was feeling very lost in my cynical, logical world. I was fairly pessimist and I was struggling to enjoy good moments. I would often find myself experiencing a nice moment and not being sure how to deal with it. Be happy? What is a nice moment? How do you define it? What is the criterion? Too many thoughts twisting around my head which were not allowing me to enjoy.

The course I followed consisted of 16 weeks during which we went through the 7 Chakras and in the final two weeks through the 6 Heart Virtues. For each Chakra and for the 6 Heart Virtues we devoted 2 weeks where during the first week we discussed about my experiences and my beliefs relevant to the content of the Chakra and in the second week we would do 3 Energy Attunements where I would basically contemplate on what we discussed the previous week and let my deeper thoughts emerge. During the course of the course I could say that a ton of subconscious thoughts, beliefs, complexes emerged and I managed to address them and come over them. However, throughout the whole course I was feeling strongly that there was no coherent target that is the endgame of the course. You see, my problem was that I was strongly attached to the notion of performance. If a process doesn't have a clear, measurable and tangible target it is just another case of loss of time and fooling around. And besides that, I had joined the program because I wanted to stop procrastinating in my work and because I was feeling a general discomfort with my life and myself. No shiny and "wow" moment of epiphany where I get enlightened and I am finally finding inner peace was actually happening!

All this continued until the last week of the course. Before my 3rd last EA I decided to sit down and do something that I was avoiding for far too long. I sat down and went through my tenor through the program. When I assembled all the scattered e-mails where I was writing to Max about my experiences in the EAs I made a realization that made me understand the meaning of what Max was trying to teach me. This process I got myself into was not a trip which had a shiny, "wow" moment of epiphany as its destination. It was actually a trip that started and it had no destination. It was a voyage of which the purpose was to become a voyager. It was a trip with the purpose of starting to perceive life, your beliefs, yourself as versatile experiences that can swing on the spiral of the unknown and grow as long as you experience. It was a change of perception, of an angle of view. From this course I learned not to do things for the "wow" moments because this mathematically leads to disappointment. I learned to perceive the moments I live as holy not because they are "wow" moments of happiness but because they are moments of being. And being is holy. Being is enough. You don't have to be anything else than what you are to be content with life. You just have to be what you are independently of your targets or your dreams. Dreams and targets are of course good but they should not be the prerequisite of happiness or the drive for achieving. Happiness is the aftereffect of acceptance of yourself and the drive for achieving is the aftereffect of a genuine need to create and to give birth and life to something.

And most important of all. During this course I understood how surrendered I was to cynicism. This is relevant to the majority of Western people at least. We grow up in a society whose cultural genetics bear the principles of the Enlightenment which are revolving around reason and science. However, these principles became the object of an obsession and now we grow up being proud of turning down and mocking the spiritual and the divine. I was like that, reducing everything to probabilities, math and reason. And that made me unhappy because I was choosing to see my instances of happiness as fleeting luck, my instances of success as a product of favourable circumstances, myself as a product of a pile of random biomes and random influences. Nothing special, no divine plan behind it, no sense of target. And all the nice moments were alienated from me because obsession with reason and control made me unable to fathom any experience. It numbed my senses and it numbed my feelings. Human life is how you choose to see it. You may choose to see the universe as a cold and Darwinistic place that was born out of randomness and is governed by the laws of randomness, consequently seeing your life as a coincidental occurrence that can actually go on until the end without finding any sense of purpose or you can choose to believe that you are connected with the universe just because you are a part of it and that everything you are and you will become is your journey in connecting with the cosmic energy. Your gateaway to that divine energy is your intuition. And the more you connect with it the more sense of "purpose" you may find. Living a human life without a spiritual compass feels like trying to find light in a world of darkness by circling around the same spot.”

-- Christos, Norway