The Journey to Self-Realization

Before she began her process of development, Amina thought meditation could be almost anything: someone in the lotus position on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, someone knitting, or someone busy with their tarot cards. Pål-Esben’s starting point in this episode is that it is impossible to do meditation at all. And when brain researchers went looking for the control room, the boss who is really you, they found nothing.

Early on her spiritual path, Amina asked a friend where you could buy spiritual clothes, and wondered whether she could still wear make-up. Now Pål-Esben asks her a far harder question: when she sits down to meditate, is it really her meditating, or is it her ego?

Pål-Esben knows a woman who sat in a tent outside the gate of a Zen temple for weeks to prove she was worthy of being let in, and his mentor slept outside his first mystical temple in Tibet for weeks before they even opened the gate to him. Years ago a counsellor convinced Pål-Esben that his mother was to blame for his burnout. It took him three years to see through it, and then he apologised to her.

As a small boy, Pål-Esben would often sit outside under the starry sky, looking at the stars and longing to come home. Around the age of 10 he could put his hand on a book and understand everything in it. Amina came back from her first experience of oneness, at a ritual at Spidsbergseter, feeling as if she had just woken up in the morning: human life is only a dream.

As a child, Amina felt something constant inside her that knew everything she did, said and felt, and it wasn’t God. Pål-Esben was once sitting at a symphony concert in Trondheim when his whole system opened up: the tears ran, and the bliss stayed in his body for weeks. The same thing happened again at the alternative health fair in Oslo, when a band called Dakini began to play.

When Pål-Esben’s first guide confronted him about his pathological jealousy, he walked out of the restaurant and didn’t speak to him for three months. He also spent seven years with a psychotherapist who just smiled and asked: “Do you still think that’s how it is?” Today he asks a procrastinating client whether he wants to be a baby sucking his dummy, or a grown man.

Pål-Esben’s own mentor meditated for around six hours a day for 20 years without breaking through, until a Zen master pushed him across into oneness, and he cried for three days. After Amina’s first real experience of oneness, at a three-day retreat, she couldn’t function for weeks and struggled even to read on her computer. A year later she went deeper, and now she no longer needs to remind herself that she is really the Sahara.

Amina once worked on one chakra a week, eating red vegetables for the root chakra and yellow ones for the third. Pål-Esben’s verdict is that no chakra really has a colour, since everything is vibration, although a pineapple eaten in a playful spirit may still do the third chakra good, if only through the placebo effect. And when it comes to the last leap, from the sixth to the seventh chakra, no amount of meditation will get you there on your own.

Many who long to wake up want it done in a month: an ayahuasca weekend in the mountains, a guided meditation to activate the pineal gland, a hit of DMT when they have 30 minutes. Pål-Esben has seen people come home from a week’s ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon with a totally destroyed third chakra, and it often takes at least a year to ground people like that again. Amina, who went through traumatic plant-medicine ceremonies, now sees that even her most exalted experiences there were part of the dream.

Pål-Esben once had to control everything, and it led him into a burnout that nearly killed him in 2003. Today he controls almost nothing: life wears him like a glove. Amina pictures herself clinging to the riverbank until her hands bleed, rather than go with the current. And she tells how her son insisted on going to school while he was still ill, threw up, and came home having learned that sometimes Mum is right.