Embracing the Lotus: A Long Journey to a Reluctant Enlightenment

This is a first-person poetic narrative by a successful middle-aged man, concerning a long spiritual journey. It began when he was twenty-seven, just getting traction with his engineering career, and was awakened from his ego-unconsciousness by mystical experiences that inspired him to scribble out reams of poetryand meet his Muse. Subsequent career demands induced him to deny the mystical experiences, quit writing poetry, and fall back asleep. For two decades he was comfortable in that sleep, but during the third, the emptiness of his successful, ego-life and bouts of depression induced him to wake up enough for him to realize there was something fundamentally wrong with it. After many hours of depression and deep thinking about his life, he realized that he had to regain the sense of meaningful wholeness he had felt when in those mystical states and writing poetry. This allegorical poem is his attempt to describe that struggle to wake up out of his long ego-sleep, regain his mystical wholeness, and through the act of writing this poem, make peace with his betrayed Muse and explicate what he learned during the process.