Back to the Cave: Life After the Spiritual Journey

I’ve made a few leaps of faith lately — trying to embrace physicality after a ten-year-long philosophical and spiritual stretch (mostly in solitude). Some of you have seen fragments of that journey back when I was writing on Medium, posting on Twitter, or starting this blog.

Reconnecting with the outer world after such an inward chapter hasn’t been easy. I’ll probably write a proper essay about that at some point.

For now, I’ll just say this: I made it.

And this post marks the beginning of a new lifestyle tag — a space where I’ll set aside the purely philosophical tone for the most time and focus on the physical, social, and everyday aspects of life I’ve neglected along the way. Maybe — and hopefully — some of you will find a small blueprint here for your own journeys.

I’ll share some everyday struggles here, but also — perhaps — a refreshing perspective of a person who managed to come back from the journey. It’s not that I’ve never lived a conventional life, but now it feels as if I’ve been reborn. Yes, in a way, I feel like a philosopher from Plato’s Cave who decided to come back — and almost didn’t, but that’s for yet another story.

I still want to encourage the inner journey — to be what I like to call myself: a spiritual entertainer. I have no dogma; I just want to live life, play, and be joyful. But if along the way I manage to hit a few bonus notes, leave a trace — that would be nice. Because whatever I do from now on couldn’t be done without first establishing myself from within.

And such a space is necessary, because many people simply fear deep philosophy and spirituality — having seen countless others who entered these topics, usually out of escapism from an unpleasant reality, and fell into a deep and dark void, stuck between two worlds, where the only things the “higher” path gave them were more questions, contradictions, and a growing inability to live everyday life.

Many never made it all the way through. They stopped halfway — when the light started to hurt the eyes, when silence got too loud. And from that in-between place, they began to preach about the “Higher Self,” believing it was spirit speaking when it was just the last, desperate cry of ego.

They never reached liberation, but they can’t return to the cave either — so they build a house in the tunnel, decorate it with mantras and astrology charts, and call it awakening. It’s not malice — it’s exhaustion. The mind is clever; it gives them symbols and slogans to protect itself from disappearing.

Out of that limbo, an entire market is born: e-books of mantras, affirmation packs, “higher self” coaching — a whole economy orbiting spiritual exhaustion. But it’s not really an economy in the usual sense; the people drawn to it are often financially strained, desperate, and grasping for meaning. It doesn’t even bite into society — no one’s threatened by it. It’s self-consuming, an auto-destruction disguised as healing: clinging to the very world you claim to transcend, trying to play the game while insisting the game is meaningless.

I’ve seen that space, felt its pull, and I almost lost to it. It’s comfortable — safer than truth, more glamorous than humility. And what happens in between quietly destroys your life, because in such a state you’re still in the same place — still in the postindustrial capitalist system that shreds you day by day.

You see, the spiritual journey — the act of stepping outside the cave — is always a failure from a conventional standpoint, because you’re wasting time on something different from the man-made play and its symbols. But if you’ve ever met or heard people who went all the way, even if they’re broke or weak physically, they’re also joyful, energetic, with an amazing sense of humor and lightness about themselves. They’re like children — untouched and unbothered by human systems, social keys, and all the nonsense.

In this way, the journey is the most phenomenal thing you can do in life. The danger lies in using it merely to escape the human play, the one full of suffering and violence. Because yes — it’s painful, frightening, filled with unnecessary competition, division, and tragedy. Yet at the same time, it’s probably the most creative thing ever placed in the universe — at least in the known part of it.

But the opposite is true as well. Living only inside the cave, chasing abstractions like papers with numbers, and funny faces printed on them — pretending that’s meaning — is its own kind of madness. Competing for illusions is no wiser than trying to transcend them as a form of escape.

After seeing both sides, I don't care whether it was enlightenment, awakening, or whatever symbolic name you want to give it. You can call me crazy, a clown, or anything you like — that’s on you.

What matters is that I escaped the trap, realized what a fool I’d been, and I’m not here to preach about it. If you look back at my older essays, you’ll find the whole journey there — the confusion, the mistakes, the ego screams, and the realization. I’ll touch those notes again sometimes, but not in this tag.

Here, I’ll just show the journey of return — various plays, my thoughts on them, and the struggles along the way. Just a human being who's not only flowing with the phenomenon of life, but also playing with man-made systems and symbols.

Hopefully, between the lines, between the tags, some people will find a blueprint — to either go out or come back — and, most importantly, to not fear one or the other. Because there is a way to live in both worlds.