Rediscovering the ego is never a good thing. I left Chiang Mai with a bag of sadness. People had shortly come to mean more to me than what’s healthy and I had started to feel a need for security, a craving for belonging. Forgetting my place in this here creation, forgetting we are all in constant connection, part of the same energy and love no matter where we are in the world. But my ego wanted to be defined and loved as one single entity. And just for a second there, I though that was what mattered. But still, the words of Slavoj Zizek kept ringing through my head: “Love is an act of evil”, “Love is simply choosing one person to be more important than others, and just deciding that it is so”. My ego grew in strength. So leaving a place of love and security after many months of lonesome travelling, the difference had made me painfully sad. I knew I needed a kickstart, I knew I needed to be reminded of what really is real and how I’m supposed to get back there. The couple I met on the bus asked me where I was going and I told them about this remote mountain home stay where I would sit and stare at the infinity for a few days. “Oh, one of those places you go to find yourself?”. Those words struck me, and I smiled to myself because no, I go to loose myself again. All this soul searching people do when travelling, all these questions; who am I? What do I want? Where am I going?” -Finding yourself? And trying to do so with meditation? That’s where we all got it wrong. Enlightened Buddhists have given up their beings, their owns, their egos. Their cravings and needs. Their place in the world is that of simply being, connected to all, free from yourself. The process of meditation is giving you the tools to dissolve your ego and be free from worldly cravings. Why are travellers, both spiritual and geographical, so keen on finding themselves? Making yourself special by trying to define who you really are. Both body and mind are in constant change. We are pure energy that shifts from one form to the next. By that, we are at the same time eternal and fleeting. We change from moment to moment, and by chasing those moments we’re gonna miss out on all of them. It’s not a bad thing, letting go. It’s not a bad thing to let yourself get lost again. When you loose your boundaries you’re free.

And now, I’m gonna apply this theory to the world. The world is moving to a more and more abstract state of being. Twenty years ago we ordinary internet users thought the internet was like air, or a black hole, somewhere things go and disappear. I thought words and games, pictures and movies happening online disappeared the second they’d been posted. Today internet is the only place where everything still can be found. We don’t print pictures or words any more. We post them online. We don’t pick up a phone and call, we click on the screen. Our financial affairs are all limited to 1′s and 0′s in a digital form. The whole stock market doesn’t even exist in reality. Anything that’s put on paper, on the other hand, is fragile. Can be lost or ruined from use and handling. But what’s online will not be ruined with use.

So is the world moving, as a Buddhist monk, towards an abstract being? Is the world disconnecting from it’s physical form? What would the reason be? Play with the idea that the world is shifting our attention from concrete to abstract. That, in fact, could be a smart way of saving itself. If we in a not so far away future no longer have a need for things in a physical form then we would consume less energy and resources.

I do know that the comparison between us dissolving our ego and the world saving itself isn’t quite as stringent as I wished it would be. I’ve some more thinking to do before these ideas chimes with perfection.

The most reassuring thing when you travel between places and arriving in new territory, is that sensation that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Every second of it, you’re right, every place, is right. Follow your feet and never listen to your heart.