Ghost Hunters Extraordinaire

Diana · Ghost Joined: 08 Oct 2009 Posts: 377 Location: London

Something I wrote about...

Cohelo's writings

I was looking through my books and found some Paulo Cohelo ones. There was a kind of fashion with Cohelo's books some years ago around here and I was reading a few too trying to capture the mystery of making so many people read and talk about it.

The books I read are: 'The Alchimist', '11 Minutes', 'Veronika Decides to Die' (the one I found the most powerful) and 'By the River Piedra (stone) I Sat and Wept'.

I found some notes I made while reading those books.

There were voices saying that Cohelo is writing for bored housewives and has no literary value whatsoever.

To me, his books seem to be an attempt of looking deeper into human nature and getting in touch with his anima. He seems to be engaged on a self-awareness journey and he does not want to stop before finding the philosopher's stone which is the ultimate knowledge. I wonder if that is possible but one can always try and enjoy the journey. Understanding human soul and mind is one of the biggest challenges in the universe. And Cohelo is trying to do that. Some of his books have wonderful inshights and are somehow painful to read as they raise a lot of questions and kill some tabus. Some of them are just commercial paper.

There are some common threads in all of them. He says we should always be in touch with what happens inside us, in our soul because that is where the true treasure lays. Follow your dream and you will find a way to it. By doing that you will find a way to happiness. Transcend the ordinary life (nevermind stepping in dog poop on the way) and catch the moments of magic that are given to you every day.

We should always be able to stay in touch with the child in us because that child understands and sees the magic moments that we may overlook most of the time. Sometimes there is sadness we cannot control because we realise the magic moment of the day has passed and we haven't done anything with it. This is not about grabbing the oportunity and stepping on corpses but about being able to see the feeble ray of sunshine that is always there somehow.

And by doing that our eyes will be bright again. We have to act differently than we were used to even if that would look like madness in other people's eyes. We act like we do because somewhere in our childhood, out parents- who thought they did us good- taught us that "childhood passions are impossible, that people don't make miracles and nobody goes on a journey without knowing where they go to". So we have to go back to the times when we were fear-free, find that smiling child and bring it with us into the present and learn from it what it is like to be really free, free from our fears, free from our superegos. That is when we will find happiness again. Till we open our hearts we are just… frozen.

It is interesting how madness is depicted in his books (veronika especially) as "the incapacity of sharing your ideas". And as a reason for that is always FEAR: fear of rejection, fear of being judged. What makes us hate ourselves? The fear of making a mistake by not doing what others expect us to do. And by doing so we are taught to avoid the conflict. And then we close our souls from the world and we fall apart within ourselves.

But there is life in the conflict and creation and progress. And we should learn again to free ourselves of all the toxic things we've been taught to believe in, of all the learnt or taught fears and find that happy and spontaneous child. Find our true self, the one we've always wanted to be. And when we've done that, when we have found ourselves and feel free to express that, that is the magic moment when we can trully love another without selfishness and fear.

That is what I have learnt from Cohelo's books.

And to end this with a quote from 'By the River Piedra...':

"Write about evrything you feel. Take it all out of your heart, put it all on paper and then throw it all away. The legend says the River Piedra is so cold that everything that falls in -leaves, insects, bird feathers- turns into stone. Who knows if it is not a good idea to throw your suffering in its water? Remember: love stays. Only people change!"
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Magic Is. That’s all, it just is. We don’t have to create it, we simply have to find it. But where do we look? Within, first, last and always; look within.

white wolf · Ghost Joined: 07 Jul 2009 Posts: 105 Location: wilts

"Write about evrything you feel. Take it all out of your heart, put it all on paper and then throw it all away. The legend says the River Piedra is so cold that everything that falls in -leaves, insects, bird feathers- turns into stone. Who knows if it is not a good idea to throw your suffering in its water? Remember: love stays. Only people change!"

The above i 100% agree with .
Blessed be

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