The Journey to Self-Realization

When the first person to confront Pål-Esben told him he was pathologically jealous, he was so furious that he ran out of the restaurant and didn’t speak to them for three months. Amina recently tripped over a dishwasher her partner had left open, and straight away felt the autopilot that wanted to blame him.

In the middle of vacuuming the stairs, Amina broke down in tears and told the vacuum cleaner: “I don’t want to die.” Pål-Esben guided his own sister through the last months of her life, introduced her to her own death guide, and stayed in contact with her in the Bardo until she turned towards the light.

Pål-Esben’s mother grew up during the war, when the Germans took over the farm she lived on, and she gave her son a mantra: the only thing that matters is survival. That existential anxiety drove him for years, through bigger and bigger companies and more and more money, until he collapsed with burnout on 23 December 2003. Amina, for her part, recently caught herself getting short with one of her children on a stressful day, and apologised almost at once.

For a year or two, Amina woke up night after night in a cold sweat, convinced that something was wrong with her heart, and she called the emergency number so often that she wonders whether they would still come today. Not long ago she went into anaphylactic shock. When her body told her she might die, she answered: “Yes, I might.” The nurse was amazed at how calm she was.

Amina grew up with a mother who has bipolar disorder, and as an adult she was given three diagnoses of her own, one of which was later taken away again. Pål-Esben lived for years with treatment-resistant depression. In desperation he flew to a clinic on Mallorca for ketamine treatment, which helped for a while but turned out not to be the answer.

As a child, Amina was shown exorcism horror films by her stepfather, who told her she had a demon inside her too. Until two years ago she had never slept a whole night with the light off. Then one night, stuck in a dream with a demon, she remembered a conversation with her teacher, looked at the being and said: “But you’re not real.” And it disappeared.

Picture a small child who smiles, throws leaves up into the air and shrieks with laughter, for no other reason than that the leaves are so exciting. For most adults that state is very far away. Pål-Esben says the way back to it runs through the heart’s rhythm, not through a pink cloud, and when his students make a breakthrough, he asks them how they have celebrated it. Often the answer is a puzzled “Huh? Celebrate?”

Amina was once told that she and the man she was in a deeply destructive relationship with were twin souls, one soul split in two, and she swallowed it whole. A year and a half ago, while giving a talk at the Alternative Fair in Oslo, she noticed a smiling man in the audience who seemed very secure in himself, and they have now been together for a year. As a boy, Pål-Esben would sit outside in the evenings, looking at the stars and longing to go home.

When Pål-Esben was starting out on his journey of development, he told his guide he wanted to move somewhere with sun and beaches, where he would be happy. The guide just laughed and asked whether he really thought he’d be happier, since his baggage would come with him. Later, paralysed on the sofa by a depression no treatment could touch, Pål-Esben made peace with it, put on Netflix, and things began to turn around.

As a child, Amina felt she had a calling, and she thought it meant she was perhaps going to be a celebrity or a superstar. Today she hears the ego as a voice that is always in a hurry, and the soul’s voice as a calm breeze. Pål-Esben describes the soul as a sphere of energy the size of our solar system, and this planet as the elite university for souls, where your challenges make up your doctoral thesis.