Welcome.It is safe to stop

BE YOUR FRIEND AGAIN.

First POST, no anesthesia, on a blank page.

THE WAY IT IS

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford.

Life is a very curious thing. One of my "talents" has always been writing. Seducing with words, structuring chaos, writing from intuition like an outpouring of the soul: feeling the sudden urge to transmit something and bam!

Yesterday, I heard an impromptu critique of another writer that struck me like lightning: "He writes very well, very effortlessly, but it is the triumph of style; the substance cannot withstand scrutiny... we are fascinated by romantics because we find complicated beings interesting, and because we worry that romantics think suicide is romantic." Touché!

Uranus is about to enter Gemini—my Sun sign—with my Moon in Sagittarius and my Ascendant straddling the intensity of Scorpio and the fire of Sagittarius. A Molotov cocktail, compounded by a retrograde Mercury that threatens to cloud my mind. And blessed be that fog. Blessed be it, because I have spent my entire life idolizing my intellect. I have been the high priest of my own mind, using my Stellium in Hod (language, structure, logic) to build impregnable castles. In the West, we are specialists at justifying everything; we are champions of the mind. And I, for years, allowed my soul to suffer, suffocating in a dark corner, just as long as the brilliant and successful goals of my intellect were being achieved on the surface.

But this space is not for my mind. This space, which we will call "BE YOUR FRIEND AGAIN", is for my Tiferet, for my Neshama, for my heart. With all its consequences.

I want you to imagine something. Imagine you've just moved to a new city. You are a stranger, you've just landed, you know no one, and the silence of your new home deafens you. You ask yourself the question we all ask in the dark: where will my soulmates be here? We tend to believe that loneliness means having no one to talk to. But true loneliness, the kind that makes your blood run cold, is the panic of being left all alone with ourselves. We flee from that silence because that is where the voice of our own incompleteness echoes the loudest. But I have a definitive answer for you: the best friend of your soul is already with you. They have been hiding "behind your mind" for decades, locked in the closet where you shoved everything you were told wasn't worthy of being loved. They are right there, waiting for you to turn off the engine. Waiting for you to listen.

That friend is your Inner Child.

We live in turbulent times. In the coming months, you will see an exponential flood of "gurus" and miraculous self-help systems. You will see an explosion of packaged mysticism. I don't judge them. We all have bills to pay in this material dimension. But we must understand something vital: the real war we are experiencing today is not for your money, it is a spiritual war for your attention. Whoever hijacks your attention, steals your soul.

We often use spirituality as a highly elegant excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our wounds. We confuse awakening with feeling special, and consciousness with a sense of superiority. The ego is a master of disguise; one dresses in a suit to go buy status, and the other dresses in false spirituality, repeating mantras so they don't have to look at their pain. But it is exactly the same ego, fleeing from itself. I am not a guru. I know nothing. I am just a real person, like you, trying to live out my own process.

My current personal situation in this Malkhut, in this dense world of material reality, is at its absolute limit. It is so extreme that, literally, I don't know if I will still be "here" next month.

So you can understand it, it's like crossing the Atlantic in a small sailboat. Suddenly, you realize you've crossed the point of no return: you are fourteen days away from the nearest coast and rescue helicopters can no longer reach you. If the mast breaks, you stay right there. You are radically, absolutely, and wonderfully alone in the face of the vastness. The trench where you used to live—that pit full of mud and fears where, nevertheless, you felt safe—loses all its meaning.

Does it mean I have no fear? Of course I do. I am terrified. And yet, beneath that terror, there is an unshakable Inner Peace. A "come what may" that doesn't even flinch. It is not resignation. It is the immense peace that descends when you surrender to life ; when you stop fighting to be "perfect" or "good" and accept the radical imperfection of the world and your own.

Getting here wasn't free. Late last year, without warning, something hit me with indescribable force. It was a total collapse. A Dark Night of the Soul. You want to die, you seriously want it all to end, and at the same time, you feel the terror of the vertigo and a courage that comes from somewhere else. Something inside you is dissolving, kicking, and fighting with all its might, while two radio stations play in your head. The station of fear screams at a deafening volume, but there is another frequency, a very faint inner light that never stops whispering: "No. Stay calm. Everything is fine... hold on."

In early December, I started to emerge from it. Naively, I thought: "That's it, my ego has dissolved, I've integrated my shadow." What a joke! The ego doesn't dissolve, it is our internal editor. My logical mind, in its infinite stubbornness to guarantee my survival, tried to rationalize the ineffable. After experiencing a Bitul—a state of annihilation of the "I" and total unification with the All, where I radically and absolutely lost my fear of death—my ego simply changed clothes. It transformed into a "spiritual ego." I created an impressive metaphysical universe, downloaded entire books in weeks, but deep down, I was still my "Gemini" shouting from the peak of the intellectual Everest: "Look how smart I am! Give me validation!"

But the heaven of inner peace is not reached by climbing mental mountains.

That is why this space is born. To return to the heart. And I don't mean that in a poetic sense. Science shows us that the heart has a vibrational field five thousand times greater than the brain. The heart thinks, feels, and acts fractions of a second before your logical mind.

That is why, when I manage to connect with my inner child today, an uncontrollable physical reaction occurs: I break down in intense tears and it is useless to try to control myself. I receive that wave of love and truth first in my chest, and by the time my intellectual head tries to understand it, my eyes are already flooded. My soul, my Tiferet, jumps for joy saying: "Finally, this stubborn old fool wakes up and listens to us!"

If this happens to you, I beg you: DO NOT BE SCARED. Feel it. Cry with all the strength you have and embrace the experience. Look your inner child in the eyes and tell them that everything is okay. That they are safe. That you are here now. Embrace them with all the love you are capable of, without measure, without limits, without judgment. Just, DAMN IT, FEEL IT!

Realize that you are taking refuge in yourself, that you are your own sanctuary. Look at yourself and say: "It is safe to stop." This emotional retreat into your own waters, into your own healing pool, is the best thing you are doing for yourself.

Don't judge your process or anyone else's. As Jacobo Grinberg used to say, to judge someone is to predetermine them; it is to believe that reality is simple. When we judge, we are nothing more than a blade of grass moved by the wind believing we are an immovable oak. The only real disease in this world is the distrust and invalidation of ourselves.

My father passed to another plane a year and a half ago. We were never really "connected" in life. And yet, now that I have lowered the weapons of my intellect, he is with me all the time. I love you, dad.

What is all this? Synchronicity, as Jung called it? Confirmation bias? I don't know. And I no longer care. When ancient mysticisms, quantum physics, declassified files, and the scream of your own soul all coincide at the exact same point, the mind stops mattering.

Once upon a time, an ocean wave, for an instant, became aware of itself. It looked around and started competing. It saw other waves that were taller, faster, and felt like a separate entity. Upon becoming aware of its "being," it forgot what it truly was: a fractal, a divine spark of the ALL experiencing itself in the form of a wave, ephemeral and divine, unique and unrepeatable. Making peace with this world is making peace with the emptiness of our soul, remembering that the wave never stopped being the sea.

The old world is collapsing, and the birth of the new one is going to hurt us. Learning to breathe hurts. In this game, the board is inside us. Loving your neighbor as yourself is no longer a moral recommendation; it is an obligation for biological and spiritual survival. It is an assertion: it is what will inevitably happen when you love yourself, because you will remember that that neighbor is you.

I am just a frightened little mammal, with a brain designed to survive, but the bearer of an immense Soul. And, above all, the bearer of an Inner Child who was wounded, who blames no one, and who is in there waiting to be heard. That frightened creature is infinitely closer to the pure Truth than the sophisticated character you have created to survive in this Matrix.

Your inner child is your soul's best friend. Embracing them is the first step to "be your friend again." It is the threshold for your soul to take the wheel and say to your ego: "Thank you for bringing me this far, thank you for protecting me. You are still necessary, but I'm driving now."

Return to your essence. Embrace it. Love it. Love yourself. And let's return to the only force that transcends Time and Space: Love.

Sal