“Not knowing who I am is the reason for my happiness”
I’m ready to talk about my psychological illness, which seems to be already healing …
Alberto José Varela (Dec., 2009)
This is a brief part of the epilogue in the second book I wrote while I was in prison, where they kept me 14 months waiting for my acquittal. It is a text by way of preview, and I anticipate that it is a crazy thing not very advisable to read. I will publish it complete soon. There are many pages. Here are a few broad brushstrokes for my readers.
This is the reason that makes me laugh the most and enjoy life: talking about myself. Especially being aware that all you can say about me is a lie. I do not own curriculum, or as they say in Colombia the curriculum, my resume is blank, even though I am 49 years, have done almost everything and have spent my life researching, experimenting, working, living … Today I have nothing to say about my past, the little I can say about me is uncertain since it would be subject to my own interpretations, and that gives me a good laugh. The funny thing is that I cannot define myself in any way.
When a book is written it is as if the writer’s ego were bound. I wrote this book myself. To some extent the ego of Alberto José Varela is bound here, so before publishing this book I thought about the possibility of not putting my name as a writer and letting the book be ANONYMOUS, so we would save ourselves all this and my readers would focus more on the content. But I decided freely, not only to let my name appear, but also to provide a space to talk about myself and to question myself about what I am. Not to tell my achievements and awards, not to mention titles or show my experience.
From my inner freedom I allow myself to write about me but not regarding what I do, have, or what I work on; publishers usually give a small curriculum of their writers, but I do not want to tell you anything about my past because I got rid of it, or to tell you what I do now or offer you anything. I feel I can only talk about my present, not because I deny my past, but because I have no longer a past. In that sense I can only talk about what it seems I am now, since I do not know yet what I am from the transcendent point of view of time and the little I know is changing every moment.
Anything that I or others say about me is an interpretation, but your interpretation about me can be much more correct than mine, I suggest that you focus on your interpretation about me because it will be very useful for you, for your self-discovery. Lies are a very useful path towards truth. You just need to know how to follow the signs and they take you straight to the truth.
Nobody is what he/she says to be, no one is what he/she seems to be, no one is what he/she pretends to be, so we are in a social lie of enormous dimensions. But it is really wonderful that we may have encounters with humans beings to get glimpses of what may be the truth. This book is an opportunity to find ourselves (and one another) from beyond appearances.
Jack Nicholson said: “Millions of people have seen me in many films where I’ve played dozens of characters, but no one knows the real Jack”
Freedom is an encounter with oneself in oneself. Whatever is found there is fine, but you have to go through hard and thick tectonic layers of appearances and lies, masks and identities that are not your own. And this is how one starts to realize what he/she is. What happens outside does not matter, but many things must happen from falsehood if we are to enter the individual truth. We have to end up trapped in a thousand and one everyday life prisons for the need to escape to be born.
TO BE is a daily escape. What I am is gradually manifesting by itself, as I tear down walls of lies, what I am comes out without any effort. My essence flows, and I fall in love with me every day. I make love with myself every night in the darkness and solitude of a cell that becomes the womb of my consciousness.
That which we are is so natural and subtle, that only awakened people may detect it, high sensitivity is necessary to realise something as soft and delicate as truth.
Philippe Gaulier, actor, playwright and pedagogue, says: “Being an actor is not a profession for sincere people, I like the liars; if I’m invited to dinner at a house of sincere people, I don’t go, I’d get bored “
In this sense I am an actor, a fictional character.
People interact with society changing and adapting to our environment so that everybody and everything around us is at ease. As if life were a play and each of us actors who interpret roles and scripts written by others.
Living in this lie is tragic but watching it is liberating and fun.
To be able to observe how stuck I have been all my life within a tiny identity makes me laugh, and laughter allows me to release a lot of stuck energy during years of dissatisfaction; because living trapped in the idea of fulfilling and enhancing the ego is a crazy and nonsensical thing. And from this madness we can only escape with an even crazier thing: to leave the ego as the house where I was living. From the point of view of my Being I was living in a house that was not mine, I was a squatter. The ego was my prison for many years. Living in the ego is living in hell, or rather die in it. From the point of view of the ego I was an intruder, because I was occupying a place of power that only corresponds to the being. Living in the being is living in paradise. It is to be alive, living and feeling the life in me. Being aware of life leads us to nature and to the essential; it is the way of truth.
By being unconscious we choose the path of the unnatural, death and self-deception; on this path everything is a show, a figuration, a lie that we are not even able to look at as such but we sell it falsely as truth.
When we want to give an idea of what we are, we fall in the need of highlighting ourselves, I call it: “existitis”. This is one of my neologism, this is how I define the psychological illness I suffered most of my life and psychologists or psychiatrists told me that it was Idiopathic or essential, that means they have no idea where it comes from or why it appears therefore it is not defined, so I made up the term to define what my illness was: “Existitis” it means inflammation of the ego, that happens when one’s own existence is more swollen than what it really is. One day I got tired of having to hold so many scaffolds on my identity’s facade and I decided to be myself. Many started asking me: have you gone mad?
We will get this far today … tomorrow if I am still alive, we shall see how we go on.
I LEAVE YOU WITH THE QUESTION, THE ANSWER WIIL BE PUBLISHED SHORTLY.
It is part of the marketing strategies that I use to keep in touch.