How can we fight this Cyclops? If you know that you cannot easily banish the Cyclops to Tartarus, then before it can bring the golden age of your relationships to an end and forge the weapons for the rest of life’s endless wars, end the argument, go to your room, and allow yourself to be alone.

At such a moment, the Cyclops within you wants with all its being to continue the argument, and it is not easy to exile yourself to your room. But make an agreement with your spouse or friend that after half an hour of reflection you will return and tell them what you yourself may have done wrong, or where they may have been right. You can ask them to do the same. During that half hour, think honestly: what is the Cyclops within me failing to see?

Call upon the Homa within you, so that with its courage and light it can open the doors of a treasure better than the Cyclops’s cave. If you honestly ask yourself where you may be wrong, or genuinely wish to discover where your spouse may be right, you can be certain that a voice within will tell you the truth—something you may already have known but did not want to accept. Who does not always want to be right? Not being right is difficult. It is difficult to accept and admit that there is something about which you may previously have been wrong.

This is a difficult road, but we have only two paths in life: either to remain what we are, or to become something better than what we are. If we choose the second road, then the person we are today is no longer our true Self; the person we can become is our true Self. To be reborn as the person we can become, we must always have the courage to die to the person we are today.

A dear friend wrote to me a definition of hell a few days ago that I would like to share with you:

“Hell is the day, at the end of life, when the person we could have become meets the person we are.” Perhaps heaven, too, is the day at the end of life when the Self—the Homa within us in whom we have been resurrected—meets the one-eyed giant we overcame through courage and insight on our hero’s journey.

Aydin Areta