#5-Treating others as enemies.
I have been the most skeptical and non-spiritual person I have ever met.
I was an alcoholic, and my overweening ego wouldn’t let me see it. I smoked several packs of Luckie Strike a day. I was unfaithful. I was hyper-egoistic, and on top of that, I thought I was the good guy in the movie.
And suddenly, my life changed. Why? Because I changed.
I guess I got tired of life going badly for me.
Now, from a distance, I can see the habits and behaviors that were distancing me from myself, my happiness, the source that makes us one with the whole, and my spirituality.
And I want to share a list of those seven bad habits that I had when I was a non-spiritual person in case you see yourself reflected in any of them, and they can help you in some way. I do not mean to offend; I want to share my experience to save you some pain.
Let’s start.
1. Not paying attention to the signs
All my life, the number 11 has chased me wherever I go.
I have seen it painted on walls.
I’ve seen it on my watch consecutively every day for months (I’m serious).
I saw it on the front door of a multinational company where I went for a job interview, got the job, and a few days later, I noticed that the parallel street (which was also part of the building) was named precisely like me, Albero García.
I am writing this article, and on the PC screen that shows the actual time weather on the street, it says, “11 degrees centigrade, mostly sunny.”
When you are not spiritual, you do not believe in these things. You don’t think they could be signs from the universe. You don’t even think it could be your subconscious or the collective unconscious. And I think that’s a mistake.
Because whether it’s for spiritual or psychological reasons when we notice something repeatedly over time, it’s because that something resonates in our unconscious, and that something is like a portal or a key or a “you’re going this way” that wants to alert us to something.
2. Overthinking about what others think of you
When I was not spiritual at all, I was ashamed to be seen to cross myself as I walked past a church.
You’re probably asking yourself, “If you weren’t spiritual, why did you cross yourself?
I did it for the same reason I did other things like touching things a couple of times, opening and closing doors four times, and not wearing certain clothes because if I wear them, my mind tells me something terrible is going to happen to me… Because I had and have OCD.
The point is that I was living too rigidly, wanting to fit in and be liked by everybody.
And since becoming spiritual, not only do I not care what others think of me, but I have been able to publicly confess my OCD which many of us who suffer from it are ashamed to talk about in case they think we are defective.
Being more spiritual or aware has freed me from prejudice toward others but primarily toward myself.
3. Constantly seeking unconsciousness
When I didn’t give a shit about spirituality, my way of soothing the pain was to anesthetize myself.
I relieved myself by binge-watching series and movies, eating carbohydrates for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and drinking a lot of alcohol.
I normalized all that and told myself it was how I had to socialize. But it was the way I could keep fooling myself.
I anesthetized myself to be less aware of my ills.
The emotional pain I felt in my life was not the problem. Pain has the function of alerting us that something is wrong. The problem was that I didn’t want to be aware of my faults
4. Repeating the same problems over and over again
When I did not believe in a higher power, the universe, or any of that, I did not believe in myself either. And therefore, I thought that my destiny was to be a loser.
Funny to believe in destiny and not be spiritual, but that’s how dumb I was.
The fact is that I did not learn from my mistakes. I did not want because, referring to the previous point, if I had learned from them, I would have lit a little light full of conscience in my life, and little by little, my ego would have collapsed. And I didn’t want to.
I wanted to be me, even if being me meant being an asshole. And make the same mistakes over and over again.
The most common one was to regret it because of the hangover from drinking the night before, promise not to do it again, and then go back to my old ways the next night.
5. Treating others as enemies
When I was not spiritual, I lived with the constant paranoia that things were going badly for me because everyone was against me.
My roommates moved into another apartment behind my back, and I saw it as a betrayal. And what was happening was that they wanted to have time to study the engineering career and not waste it with my parties and craziness.
My partner left me on the phone, and I thought she was ruthless. And what happened is that she wanted a better life than the one I could give her in those moments when I was a natural disaster.
And so on.
When I started to wake up, I realized that deep down, I was a pile of sh*t with legs. And people stayed away from me because they didn’t want to end up like me, and I don’t blame them.
6. Feeding the ego
One of the things I did when I was not spiritual was to feed my ego at the slightest opportunity.
If someone said they knew a famous person, I had to say I knew someone more famous.
If someone said they had traveled to Paris, I had to go to Ibiza and share the photos.
I always had to be the one.
And that need for attention was just my ego wanting to survive.
Because the ego wants to survive even if it means you die.
That’s why my “tough guy” ego would rather keep drinking, and I would die than stop drinking, and that “tough guy” ego would die.
7. Trying to change the world without changing yourself
I remember participating in the famous movement 15 M; on the internet, there are pictures of me camping in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, smoking and drinking.
I wanted to change the world, and I was a guy unable to take care of me.
Now I remember it, and I realize that it is widespread to want the world to change when you are not spiritual because you believe that everything is someone else’s responsibility, never yours.
This also happens on a small scale when we look for tiny culprits for daily inconveniences.
If the toilet paper runs out when you are doing your business, you shout, “Who forgot to refill the toilet paper” instead of going to get it yourself.
You are in a traffic jam due to an accident; you think, “how morbid people are; if they didn’t stop to look at the accident, the traffic would go more smoothly,” and then when you pass by the crash site, you stop to look.
If you are late, it’s your partner’s fault; he always takes three hours to get ready instead of foreseeing it and leaving earlier.
And so on.
At least, it used to happen to me all the time. And it still happens to me, but less.
Being spiritual is simply taking responsibility for yourself and helping others to live better.
A virtual hug
AG
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