Along our path we will attain goals that only we ourselves know have, over time, brought us progressively closer to the vocation of our life and to attaining the Self.

To live in this way is not to wander among lodgings that are all equally meaningless, whether nearer to or farther from the exit from the desert. Living with such meaning gives us the courage, in the final moment of life, to look back at the path we have travelled and, in our hearts—in that final moment emptied of falsehood and filled with ending—to feel that we can smile at the splendour of meeting the Self in the presence of death.

In that final moment we can stand upright before the person we could have become, look into their eyes, and see only ourselves reflected there.

On such a path, what suffering could we not carry proudly like a cross?

The curse of human life is not suffering, but suffering without meaning. With the discovery of meaning, we can stand above our sufferings upon a summit from which even life’s greatest tragedies no longer appear as tragedies.

Aydin Areta