“To bathe in the waters of life,
and wash away what is human,
I enter into self-effacement,
and the greatness of inspiration.”
There are words I do not want to understand immediately. I prefer to let them rest within me for a while because I sense that their meaning grows when I do not explain them too quickly. The four lines, “To bathe in the waters of life, and wash away what is human, I enter into self-effacement, and the greatness of inspiration,” are among those words for me. I do not read them as an invitation to escape being human or to give myself up. Rather, I discover in them an inner path from holding on to letting go, from the limited image I have of myself towards a moment in which something greater may be allowed to shine through me. Each of these lines touches a different layer of that path for me.
“To bathe in the waters of life”
When I read of the waters of life, I do not first think of something otherworldly or unreachable. I think of life itself, before I divide it into right and wrong, successful and unsuccessful, important and unimportant. There is something special about water for me because it cannot be held on to and yet touches everything. It takes the shape of whatever surrounds it without losing its own nature. Perhaps that is why this image speaks to me so strongly. To bathe in the waters of life means, for me, exposing myself more directly to life again, rather than only thinking about it, judging it or observing it from a safe distance. It means giving myself to what is here now, even when I cannot control everything.
I have found that I can become distant from life even while standing right in the middle of it. This does not happen because I experience less, but because I begin to experience so much only through my own ideas. A conversation is immediately categorised, an encounter judged, an experience compared with earlier ones. The mind is quick to turn something living into something familiar. To bathe in the waters of life therefore also means, for me, not already knowing everything for a moment. To allow something to reach me again before I decide what it means. Just as water touches the skin before I think about whether it is warm or cold enough, life too can reach me before my mind turns it into a story.
“and wash away what is human”
This line occupied me most at first because I do not experience my humanity as something that needs to be cleansed or overcome. I do not want to wash away my feelings, my mistakes, my needs or my limitations as though they were something impure. They are part of my life. So I understand “what is human” differently here. For me, it refers to those layers we gather over the course of our lives and eventually mistake for our true nature. Roles, expectations, judgements, fears, comparisons, the desire for recognition and the idea that we constantly have to be someone in particular.
I know this weight well. It accumulates almost unnoticed. I carry an experience with me, then an opinion about that experience, and later an idea about what it supposedly says about me. Other people reflect something back to me, and I begin to see myself through their eyes. Layer upon layer settles over me. Outwardly, the same person remains visible, yet inwardly the connection to something simpler can grow quieter and quieter. When I speak of washing something away in this context, I do not mean getting rid of what is human. I mean laying down what has come to cover over our immediate humanity. Not becoming less human, but being able to be human again without so many layers in between.
Perhaps part of our inner tiredness comes precisely from how much we keep maintaining about ourselves. We remember who we were yesterday so that we can be the same person again today. We defend views, roles and stories because they give us orientation. Yet there are moments when I sense how freeing it would be not to have to explain any of it for a while. Not an author, not a seeker, not someone who knows, not someone with a particular past. Simply here. In such moments, it really can feel as though something is being washed away. Not my humanity, but what I have made of it.
“I enter into self-effacement”
The word self-effacement can sound radical at first, and for me it would be wrong to understand it as the destruction of the self. I do not read it as a rejection of who I am or a wish to cease to exist. Rather, it describes for me a moment in which the constantly asserted self becomes quieter. The self that judges, controls, compares, holds on and endlessly wants to know what something means for me. It does not truly disappear. It simply steps out of the centre for a moment.
I know such moments. They can arise while writing, in nature, in quiet perception or during an experience in which I am so completely present that I am no longer observing myself. Then I am not thinking about whether I am happy, spiritual enough, right or wrong. The constant commentary stops for a moment. I am still there, but I am no longer continuously occupied with myself. I experience that as a particular kind of freedom. Because for me, an astonishing amount of our inner constriction arises from constantly watching, judging and securing ourselves.
In my exploration of Reiki and inner perception, I have experienced something similar. The more strongly I tried to produce a particular experience, the more my own wanting stood between me and what I was perceiving. When that demand eased, the experience often became simpler and at the same time more immediate. I do not want to turn this into a universal spiritual law. It is my personal perception. But it has taught me that the self does not always have to disappear for something greater to become perceptible. Sometimes it is enough for it to stop filling every space completely.
“and the greatness of inspiration.”
Today, I no longer understand inspiration only as the sudden idea from which a text, an image or a new project emerges. For me, inspiration is something deeper. The word itself carries the image of breathing in, as though something enters us that was not entirely made by us beforehand. When I write, I know moments when thoughts appear that I had not planned. Of course, they arise from my knowledge, my experiences, my memories and everything my brain has processed. And yet the moment in which they appear feels different from deliberate construction. I do not have the sense that I have to force something into existence. Rather, something emerges and I am present enough to notice it.
Perhaps the greatness of inspiration lies for me precisely in the fact that it cannot be completely controlled. It does not always come when I need it, and it cannot be summoned reliably. I can create conditions in which I become more open, but I cannot command the actual spark. This connects the final line for me with the three that came before it. As long as I only want to control life, as long as I hold tightly to my roles and my own self comments on every moment, there is little room for anything that has not already been planned. When these layers become quieter for a moment, something unexpected can enter. An idea, a perception, a sense of spaciousness or a new way of seeing something I have looked at a hundred times before.
In this, I also recognise something of what accompanied me while writing New Reiki – Back to the Source. For me, source does not mean leaving something human behind or dissolving myself into a spiritual idea. It means coming closer again to that immediate perception before everything is overlaid by explanations, expectations and fixed images. I have found that a different form of inspiration can arise precisely there. Not because I suddenly gain access to some all-knowing source, but because there is less of myself standing between me and my perception.
When I read the four lines together today, I therefore do not see a path away from being human. I see a path deeper into it. I step into life, let go for a moment of the ideas I carry about myself, become quiet enough not to keep placing myself at the centre, and discover there a space in which something new can arise. Perhaps this is the self-effacement that touches me most deeply: not disappearing, but stopping for a moment the effort of holding on to myself. And perhaps inspiration begins precisely where I no longer try to become greater, but become spacious enough for something to live through me.