The danger of going from the maternity ward to the crematorium without knowing your true self

Monday Muse struck a somewhat different chord this time, here's a personal story.

After several musings of instructional and abstract pieces of writing, I wish to tell you a story.

It's a story about a young highly personable and empathic guy, tilting towards extroversion, whose restless spirit got him on the move yet again.

I packed my life into two suitcases and moved to a new city and a new country where I have never been before.

This city was Prague.

Little did I know of its rich history, allure, and cultural significance. Outside of what I've learned from the cultural memes about the Czech Republic and the highly selective and curated version of history highlights that make their way into the standardized curriculum.

Hailing from the Adriatic region, I was inundated and molded into a cultural fusion of outlandish Balkan Orthodoxy clashing with the Vienna Habsburg School Strict Squares. Marinated and cooked overnight in a steamy stew of Vanilla Marxism.

You know, the somewhat watered-down version disguised as Socialism.

But let's leave this rabbit hole for another time.

It's fair to say that my expectations of Czech culture and "the local vibe" I was attuning myself towards were way off.

I was somewhat shocked. And not because I haven't been traveling and living abroad before. Several countries and completely different cultures ago.

I was working under the assumption that it's a Slavic lingual culture. I'll fit right in due to my extensive experience with other Slavic cultures.

I wasn't expecting something so close to home to be so alien.

At first, it was the little things.

Daily interactions ranging from a complete lack of interest to downright dismissiveness and what we would normally consider rude behavior.

A complete not giving a fuck mood coming even from people working in the service industry.

My professional persona's world was turned upside down.

I couldn't fathom the invisibility cloak that was bestowed upon me.

After the initial shock wore off and I caught the frequency, it felt liberating though.

I slowly came to grasp the immensity of this gift. The ability to get lost in your own self.

The process of decomposition and unraveling of all the layers of social conditioning and mannerisms that I've been carrying around was gradual.

The initial surge of novelty and impression of condensed time was accompanied by immersion into the local ex-pat bubble.

But then something happened that shifted the metamorphosis into high gear.

My first encounter with psilocybin mushrooms (it became apparent that one time during college, those weren't really psilocybe Cubensis about 45 minutes into the trip).

As though my cultural conditioning and relationships haven't been exposed to a dissolution process fast enough.

My entire ontological library; the operating system or existential "truth" about the nature of the world in which I live was gone.

Like someone poured acid over it and it vanished into the void.

At first, this was a breakthrough, looking through a different set of spectacles.

I felt reborn like I'm experiencing the world for the first time.

The fungal friends were gentle and opened my eyes to a vault of what you would call etheric knowledge.

It felt like cheating. My brain had undergone a complete overhaul.

Decades of neurosynaptic connections and truncated behaviors felt away at the sidelines like they were nothing.

I had gone through an invisible door and the earlier version of me was gone.

My cognitive capacity went into overdrive and my lingual craftsmanship began to feel as if I'm molding reality by the very words that I speak into existence.

I spent hours, weeks, months, and years catching up on spirituality, comparative religion, mythology, psychedelics, occultism, magick, nutrition, and Jungian psychology to name a few.

I was always a history buff and a nerd. But this felt like something else.

Like I finally met my subconscious mind. My higher Self.

The other half, my twin flame.

I quickly lost interest in the typical cultural norm. The caffeine induced 9-5 work routine balanced with a weekend alcohol craze.

The only thing that I found myself missing throughout the 2-year cultural lockdown was a good techno party to be completely transparent.

But that's skipping ahead.

I found myself unable to sustain any semblance of interest in the mundane, work-sleep-party-repeat rhythm.

So I handed in my resignation and turned down the promotion that I already locked in.

I went bravely into freelance mode, scoring a market research client that kept me crushing numbers and going into deeper isolation in a fairly introverted set and setting.

This was my fore into remote work and the freedom from open space steel bars and glass walls.

At first, this also felt like cheating.

I was able to do my work in far less than 8 hours per day. And I could do it on my own schedule (outside of the agreed deadlines).

This allowed me to pretty much do whatever I wanted to on any given day.

If I felt like going for a walk in the morning and cruising downtown Prague. I could sit in a cafe and observe the bustling hordes of tourists shifting about town.

I could go for a meal at that restaurant that I like on the other side of town on a whim.

I could plug into their Wifi and do a couple of hours of work and be done for the day.

I could also sit in my boxer shorts at home for a couple of days spending 2 hours working and devoting the rest of the time to feeding my insatiable appetite for universal truths.

And I did all of that for a long time. Sometimes after a week or so at home, I felt what some of those 16th-century Alchemists must have felt like.

Locking themselves away into hiding from the Church so they could immerse themselves in their great work of finding the Philosopher's Stone.

It felt entirely psychedelic like I was fashioning my own reality tunnel that was completely severed from what was happening outside my window.

Sometimes I found myself going out to work from a garden cafe during summer (those were my fav spots) so that I would feel connected to nature and human beings.

In retrospect, this feels like BootCamp preparation for Covid lockdowns and social isolation.

This period of my life is what I would now call an oscillation. The big retreat into the inner realms of myself.

This slow-paced roasting also known as the individuation process in psychological terms was what was necessary for my decoupling from false identities and social conditioning.

A gradual rotting and decay of what I once held as my self or my persona.

A highly painful process that required a significant amount of honesty and courage to meet my shadow.

The ugly, the discarded, the dissociated and projected outwardly fractured pieces of myself that I felt shameful and disgusted about.

What I grew up hiding from others and ultimately from myself, and that would always show up in relationships with myself and others.

This is what we all fear to embrace because it is where our capacity for atrocities harbors.

This is what is most painful about accepting that part of ourselves. The fact that we're not only "good" high and mighty samaritans.

But that we're equally as "bad" and capable of spite, revenge, and harm.

Without accepting this part of ourselves, the probability for this fractured aspect of our subconscious to lash out is significant.

And what's even worst, is that our creative capacity and zone of genius can be hidden away in our shadow too.

The psychological term for this is the Golden Shadow, which I'd love to dig into at another time.

Because it feels like this story is coming to a conclusion, to respect the storyline to some extent at least.

And also to remain faithful to this newsletter's promise.

I assume you're able to discern and distill the actionable pieces of alchemical gold from the story itself.

But let me also spell it out:

Life moves in rhythms, always expanding and contracting. This is neither good nor bad, only seasons of life.

• Clear boundaries and "me time" is key for personal growth and fostering creativity

• Boundary dissolution (via moving to another culture or psychedelics) is an effective way of deconditioning yourself from limiting identities and beliefs

Prague in Slavic languages translates into Threshold.

And this city with its alchemical history and lingering spirit was definitely a threshold for me.

As a labor of love inspired by this Alchemical tradition, I gave birth to a 7-Day foundational online course for Self-Mastery that we kicked off last Monday.

Today, it's available as an evergreen free program that will take you through the 7 Hermetic Principles and daily exercises to reboot your mental Operating system and reorient your life trajectory towards your highest excitement.

An online course and gateway to a community of creatives and visionaries.