, what is it, precisely, that you are trying to become free of?
Because if the answer is the world — its noise, its demands, its entanglements — then monasticism makes a certain sense. You are removing the friction. But removing friction is not the same as resolving what generates it. The malice and sorrow, the longing and the restlessness — these don’t require the world as their cause. They are installed at a level far deeper than circumstance.
A man alone in a quiet room can suffer exquisitely.
You know this already. The self-inquiry you find so compelling is pointing at exactly this — that the source isn’t out there, in responsibilities and marriages and worldly concerns. It’s the sense of being a someone to whom all of this is happening.
So here is perhaps a more useful question than am I ready for the monastery:
How am I experiencing this moment of being alive — right now, as a 43-year-old English teacher, already living with remarkable simplicity — and what, precisely, is still preventing this moment from being enough?
Because the actual is not waiting for you inside monastery walls.
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