Memories of the past

Today I’m visiting the house where I grew up in France, and sorting through my old stuff, looking at the things that made my life then, reading my journals, etc. I write:

"I have been plunging today into memories of the past, e.g. taking a fresh look my ambiguous relationship with religion -- I knew that there was "something there", but a lot of the stuff was bothering me, and there was nowhere else to turn for spiritual life at the time than my Catholic cultural background -- what a trip. For example, I wrote an account of the mystical experience I had when I was 13 (without knowing then what it was), of my realization that "to live is to see God in everything" (i.e. that our inner mental disposition determines our outer life). Quite profound, huh... Guess I didn't quite apply the insight in the troubled years (teenage) that followed.

I read journals I wrote, and see all the confusion and the difficulty I had to understand what life was about, what love was about, I see the pain, the despair at times, the lack of tools. The struggle with negative emotions (jealousy, incapacity to love, insecurity, etc), with understanding what this is all about, the tension between the material life that was proposed to me and a more spiritual life unfortunately obscured by the errors of religion, which discouraged me in the end. Seeing the early years of my life in this light brings in me much love and compassion for the countless beings who now suffer like I suffered in my heart through teenage. May they also find a path to... "salvation", freedom, love. Incredible how these words from the Christian traditions now make sense to me.

Comes to my memory what I was filling my days with at the time, the quiet desperation at time, the empty days spent playing cards on my own or watching TV for hours on end, the vague intuition that love was everything (the word love fills my journals), while not being able to express it with my parents, seeking timidly to express it with my friends, I remember reading tons of books (guess this is what "saved" me), I remember enduring things that I didn't like without ever deploying energy to change anything (feeling incapacitated at times by my parents' authority), I remember all these hours, days, months, years of my life. Waoh..."