Escola da Transfiguração Consciente

A Global Call to the Crossing Toward Love and Reconciliation

“And a great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the Moon and the Earth beneath her feet, and a crown of stars upon her head.” (Rev. 12:1)

I. The Value That Cannot Be Measured

Perhaps one of the deepest mistakes we have learned is to confuse difference with value.

We are different. We have different tastes, affinities, and ways of perceiving beauty, attraction, harmony, pleasure, and interest. This is part of our constitution and does not need to be eliminated. On the contrary, our capacity to perceive, choose, prefer, and become attached is a legitimate part of human experience.

The problem begins when this faculty leaves its proper place and starts functioning as an instrument for classifying people themselves: when what I like becomes what I consider superior; when what I desire begins to be worth more; when what does not attract me begins to seem lesser; when a preference ceases to be merely a relationship between me and what I perceive and begins to function as a verdict on the value of what exists.

This is how, at many moments in history, we learned to assign people a kind of market value. Certain faces came to be worth more. Certain bodies, skin tones, kinds of hair, ages, proportions, and physical characteristics became desirable models. Little by little, what could have remained within the legitimate sphere of taste and attraction began to interfere with the way we recognize dignity, beauty, and belonging.

This process was cruel because it turned people into comparable objects. As we do when choosing the decoration of a house, a piece of clothing, a piece of furniture, or any other consumer object, we began to select human characteristics according to scales of preference. What should have remained within the peripheral realm of taste advanced into a field to which it does not belong: the value of existence.

But one person is not a better or worse version of another person. Every human being is singular.

When I say that each person is the best that God made, I do not mean that someone is better than someone else. That would simply repeat the same logic we are trying to overcome. I mean something else: no one is born as an imperfect attempt to correspond to a superior model. No one is a failed version of another person. Every existence possesses a singularity that does not need to be validated by comparison.

Perhaps we find this difficult to understand because we learned to organize almost everything by scales: more beautiful and less beautiful; more desirable and less desirable; more useful and less useful; more productive and less productive; more admired and less admired. Market logic requires these comparisons. Goods need to be classified, evaluated, and priced. Some are rare, others abundant; some possess certain characteristics, others do not; some meet certain needs better.

The problem begins when this grammar crosses the boundary of things and starts organizing the way we look at people. Then we begin to live in a kind of stock exchange of the human. A certain face is worth more. A body receives a higher valuation. A profession increases someone’s social price. Prestige, income, intelligence, youth, productivity, number of followers, and the ability to arouse desire begin to function as indices of appreciation.

And there is something even more painful: after a while, we ourselves learn to look at ourselves through the eyes of this market. Instead of asking who we are, we begin to ask how much we are worth in the eyes of others.

It is a silent violence, because a person’s value cannot depend on the intensity of the desire they awaken in someone else. The sentence “this seems more beautiful to me” belongs to a legitimate dimension of human experience. The sentence “therefore this being is worth more” belongs to something completely different. It is precisely in this clandestine passage that preference can become hierarchy.

We can continue perceiving beauty. We can continue feeling attraction. We can continue preferring certain forms, voices, faces, colors, and expressions. None of this needs to disappear. What needs to be recovered is the awareness that these experiences speak about our relationship with what we perceive, not about the essential value of what exists.

Not being attracted to someone does not diminish that person. Not liking something does not make it inferior. Not desiring someone does not turn that existence into waste. And when we manage to return each of these perceptions to its proper place, something important happens: the person stops appearing before us as a product and appears again as a presence.

Perhaps this is also where beauty recovers a deeper spiritual dimension: not as competition, not as a universal model, not as a scale on which some win and others lose, but as a manifestation of singularity.

Beauty then ceases to answer only the question, “How much does this please me?”, and begins to make room for another: “What exists here that I have not yet learned to contemplate?”

A creature truly contemplated ceases to be a category. It becomes a presence.

And presence has no price.

II. Desire in Its Proper Place

Recognizing that taste, attraction, and preference do not determine the value of things or people does not mean that we need to eliminate them. Nor would that even be possible. They belong to our constitution and legitimately participate in the way we experience the world.

We like certain colors and not others. Certain flavors please us more. Some people awaken attraction, affinity, or curiosity in us; others do not. There is music that passes through us and other music that says very little. There are environments in which we feel good and others we wish to leave. All of this is part of human experience.

Perhaps it is not even adequate to call this capacity “aesthetic discernment,” as though we were constantly making an intellectual judgment about what we perceive. It is something more elementary and broader: a sensory faculty connected to the intellect, to the formation of personality, to the experiences we accumulate, to our sensitivity, and to what constitutes us singularly.

We have preferences because we are different, and that can be perfectly harmonious. The problem has never been preference. The problem begins when preference leaves its secondary place and starts claiming authority over what it has no competence to decide.

What should merely inform us — “this pleases me,” “this attracts me,” “this gives me pleasure” — begins silently to produce other verdicts: “this is better,” “this is worth more,” “this deserves more attention,” “this is more worthy of care.”

It is at this moment that something becomes disordered within us. A legitimate preference begins to function as a moral, existential, and even ontological criterion. We begin to evaluate what exists not for what it is, but for its capacity to satisfy us.

And it is important to insist here: this does not require desire to be destroyed or repressed. Desire is not an enemy. Desire is an excellent messenger, but a terrible sovereign.

It carries precious information about us. It can reveal needs, point to affinities, show limits, and participate in love, creativity, sexuality, curiosity, the will to build, and movement toward another person. The problem appears when one of these pieces of information takes the form of an absolute command.

Desire can say, “I want this,” but we can still ask, “Is this good?” It can say, “This gives me pleasure,” but we can still ask, “Is this good for me?” It can say, “This person attracts me,” without that implying, “This person is worth more.” And it can say, “This person awakens no desire in me at all,” without producing the conclusion, “Therefore their beauty, dignity, or importance is lesser.”

This distinction seems simple when put into words. In practice, however, it is one of the capacities we most easily lose when our inner life no longer has an axis capable of ordering our different dimensions.

We are beings made up of many forces. There is reason, feeling, impulse, biological need, desire, memory, imagination, intuition, consciousness. There is also what we recognize as spirituality, inspiration, openness to something greater than ourselves. None of these dimensions needs to disappear, and none of them is, in itself, an enemy of the others.

The human challenge may lie precisely in making them coexist in a relationship of balance, regulation, and reciprocity. A reason that eliminates feelings becomes arid. A feeling that admits no reflection can carry us away. A spirituality that despises the body divides us. A body treated only as a machine of satisfaction enslaves us. An intuition regarded as infallible loses the capacity for discernment. And desire transformed into the ultimate criterion slowly begins to reorganize the whole world around the self.

At that point, we no longer ask only what something is. We immediately ask what it can give us, what sensation it produces, whether it meets some need of ours, whether it increases our pleasure, whether it confirms what we want. Whatever does not satisfactorily answer these questions begins to lose importance.

A person who does not interest us can be ignored. Someone who does not awaken attraction can be treated as invisible. A relationship that no longer produces excitement can be discarded. Friendship begins to be measured by usefulness. Knowledge begins to matter only if it produces advantage. Work is valued for what it offers in money or prestige. Even spirituality can be reduced to the search for pleasant experiences, immediate comfort, or personal validation.

The whole of reality begins to be organized according to its capacity to produce reward. And there is one word that appears repeatedly in this logic: me. It pleases me. It serves me. It interests me. It attracts me. It benefits me. It entertains me. It satisfies me.

Little by little, what should merely participate in our life begins to organize life as a whole. And when the self becomes the only measure, our perception of the other begins to suffer. We no longer necessarily encounter a person. We encounter a possibility of satisfaction, a threat, a competitor, an obstacle, a resource, an opportunity.

This helps explain why so many relationships can acquire a profoundly opportunistic character without the people involved necessarily being conscious of it. We do not need to wake up in the morning and decide to use someone. It is enough that we have learned to build bonds almost exclusively around the question of what we receive from them.

If it gives me pleasure, I stay. If it confirms me, I draw closer. If it increases my status, I value it. If it offers me an advantage, I care. If it ceases to fulfill that function, I begin to withdraw.

In this way of existing, relationships cease to be encounters between two existences and begin to function as exchange operations. Not because there is necessarily deliberate malice. Often we simply have not learned another way of living. We grow up within a culture in which practically everything can be evaluated, compared, ranked, replaced, and discarded. The logic we use to choose objects slowly invades the way we relate to people, and desire finds a perfect environment in which to become the criterion.

That is why the issue is not to condemn desire. It is to return it to its proper place.

Desiring something is not a sin against existence. Feeling pleasure is not decadence. Feeling attraction is not superficiality. Liking comfort is not a moral failure. Wanting to be loved is not weakness. Wanting sex, rest, food, beauty, welcome, and safety belongs to our human condition.

The mistake lies in demanding from these experiences what they cannot offer. No momentary satisfaction can sustain an existence by itself. No pleasure can answer for our value. No satisfied desire can replace meaning. No attraction can determine another person’s dignity. No acquired object can build an identity by itself.

The body asks. The mind imagines. Desire moves. Pleasure rewards. But some other dimension within us needs to be able to ask: “And where are we going?”

Perhaps this is precisely the question that is lost when the inner axis weakens. Reason, which could help us orient our desires, then begins to work for them. We do not think, “Is what I want good?” We think, “How do I justify what I want?” We do not ask, “Am I seeing this person justly?” We look for reasons in them that legitimize our rejection. We do not investigate, “Why do I need this?” We construct arguments to prove that we do.

Intelligence, in this case, does not disappear. It may remain extraordinarily sophisticated. But its function changes. Instead of orienting desire, it becomes its advocate. We find brilliant justifications for what we had already decided emotionally. We create entire theories to protect preferences. We rationalize impulses. We turn conveniences into principles. And the greater our intellectual capacity, the more elaborate these justifications can become.

That is why a truly mature reason may not be one that simply knows how to argue. It is one that can also interrogate what it wishes to defend.

“I want this. But why?”
“I reject this. But what exactly am I rejecting?”
“This pleases me. But is it good for me?”
“This person does not serve me. But since when does a person need to serve me?”
“My desire is legitimate. But does it need to govern?”

This exercise does not diminish our freedom. On the contrary, perhaps it is one of the deepest forms of freedom we can experience.

Freedom cannot mean only being able to do what we desire. If that were the case, a person completely governed by their impulses would also be the freest, and we know that this is not so. Someone who needs to satisfy their desires continuously can be profoundly dependent on them. The more they need the world to adapt to their preferences in order to remain well, the less free they become before the world itself.

Perhaps freedom is also the capacity to desire something without immediately needing to obey the desire: to feel without being dragged away; to like without turning preference into law; to dislike without turning difference into contempt; to desire without possessing; not to desire without diminishing.

And when this begins to happen, something curious occurs. The world recovers its own existence.

The tree is no longer valuable only because it offers shade. Music no longer needs to prove its usefulness. Friendship ceases to exist only for the benefit it provides. A person does not need to attract us for us to recognize their beauty. What exists can finally be perceived also outside the relationship it has with us.

It is a small revolution of consciousness, because we stop being the center of evaluation of everything.

And perhaps this is precisely what opens space again for something greater. Not to destroy desire, expel the body, or silence feelings, but so that each dimension within us may occupy the place that belongs to it.

Pleasure remains pleasure. Preference remains preference. Desire remains desire. But none of them needs to define by itself what is good, beautiful, worthy, or true.

Freedom begins when our parts stop competing for the throne and learn to participate in one and the same life.

III. The Empty Chair

Perhaps it is imprecise to say that desire was crowned, because a coronation implies a conscious gesture, a deliberate choice, almost an inner ceremony in which we hand over the government of ourselves to desire.

Most of the time, that is not what happens.

Desire simply occupies an empty chair.

When what should orient our life loses strength, when we no longer recognize any axis superior to immediate impulse itself, when meaning, consciousness, hope, responsibility, spirituality, or the perception of a greater good cease to exercise an organizing function, something still has to keep conducting existence.

And desire is there. It always has been.

It is fast, concrete, biologically efficient. It produces a response, offers reward, creates movement. It knows how to say: “I want this.” “I do not want that.” “This pleases me.” “This threatens me.” “This excites me.” “This comforts me.”

And when the center is empty, this mechanism that should merely participate in our life naturally begins to organize it — not because it is evil, but because it found a place that did not belong to it.

Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to perceive what is happening to us. We do not necessarily feel that we are living in a disordered way. On the contrary, we can keep working, buying, planning, producing, traveling, building relationships, consuming information, seeking comfort, studying, carrying out projects, and pursuing goals. Everything seems to work.

But little by little, the logic organizing these activities begins to look more and more like a circuit: desire, search, satisfaction, decline, new desire. And then we repeat. Again, and again, and again.

This movement can become so ordinary that we begin to call it simply life.

Perhaps one of the greatest confusions lies precisely in the way we learned to think about happiness. We often imagine it as a state of permanent exaltation. A happy person would be someone continuously cheerful, satisfied, willing, light, smiling, full of energy, and free from anguish.

But this model is practically impossible. No organism lives in constant euphoria. No real human existence remains permanently at the summit. Life oscillates. There is tiredness, loss, frustration, conflict, sadness, waiting, silence. There are days when simply nothing extraordinary happens.

If we identify happiness with a peak, we condemn ourselves to live continually beneath it. And then happiness ceases to be a possible experience and starts functioning as a future promise: when I succeed, when I buy, when I find, when I solve, when I change, when I arrive, when I achieve. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next year. Perhaps after that project. Perhaps when I finally become the person I imagine I should be.

Thus, what should belong to the present is permanently transferred to a time that does not yet exist.

And we create a kind of economy of happiness.

The logic resembles the one we use for material goods. We save money today to acquire something tomorrow. We give up a present possibility in order to reach a future goal. This makes sense when we are dealing with things that can be accumulated, measured, and exchanged. Money can be saved. Resources can be added up. Wealth can grow. Objects can be acquired.

But being does not work in the same way.

We cannot accumulate serenity today to use it five years from now. We do not store courage in an account, stockpile tenderness, gather hope in installments, or buy presence to use later. These things exist only while they are lived.

Patience exists while we practice patience. Friendship exists while we relate. Courage exists while we cross what challenges us. Justice exists when we do justice. Love exists while we love.

Perhaps this is one of our most painful mistakes: we learned to accumulate in order to possess and began to imagine that we could accumulate in order to be.

But we accumulate nothing for being. And so we indefinitely postpone what could only exist in the present. We begin to possess more and more things and continue waiting for the moment when we will finally begin to exist differently.

That is why so many satisfactions can be true and still insufficient.

Pleasure is not false. The joy of achieving something is not false. The body really does respond. Neurotransmitters really do participate. There is relief, enthusiasm, excitement, ecstasy, a sense of reward. All of this is real.

The problem lies in demanding from these experiences a permanence they were not biologically made to offer. A peak must descend. Intense excitement diminishes. Novelty ceases to be new. What yesterday seemed extraordinary becomes part of everyday life.

And when there is nothing deeper sustaining the person, the descent can be experienced as emptiness. Then we need another stimulus: another purchase, another relationship, another experience, another approval, another novelty, another peak.

Not because we are morally weak, but because the system has learned to seek repeatedly what produces immediate reward. And the more we organize life around these peaks, the harder it becomes to remain in the intervals. Silence seems insufficient. Routine seems poor. Delay seems intolerable. Waiting seems like loss. Simplicity seems like absence.

Perhaps happiness is something else.

Not a peak.

Perhaps it is a ground beneath us: a deeper state of inner stability that does not eliminate oscillations, but keeps each oscillation from completely undoing us.

A happy person can be sad. Can suffer. Can lose. Can cry. Can feel fear. Can cross a difficult season. The difference may be that something remains standing through all of it.

There is meaning. There is trust. There is hope. There is a relationship with oneself that does not disappear in the face of failure. There is a perception of value that does not depend exclusively on what has just happened. There is something alive capable of saying: “This hurts, but it is not everything. This went wrong, but I did not disappear. I am suffering, but there is still a path. I am not in my best moment, but I am still here.”

This inner ground does not need to keep us from seeking pleasure. On the contrary, perhaps it allows us to enjoy it better.

When we do not demand that a pleasant experience sustain our whole existence by itself, we can simply receive it for what it is. A good meal can be a good meal. A trip can be a trip. An encounter can be an encounter. Sex can be sex. An achievement can be celebrated. A purchase can bring satisfaction. None of these things needs to carry the impossible weight of justifying our existence.

It is precisely here that the difference between satisfaction and fulfillment appears.

Satisfaction answers a need or desire. Fulfillment seems to reach another layer. It can even arise in experiences that are not immediately pleasurable. Caring for someone can be deeply tiring and still produce meaning. Studying something difficult can require effort and generate fulfillment. Asking forgiveness can hurt and make us more whole. Giving up an unjust advantage can cost us something and still produce peace. Remaining beside someone in a difficult situation may not generate an immediate reward, but it can enlarge our existence.

Fulfillment does not seem to depend only on what we receive. Very often, it is born from what we build.

And perhaps this is a fundamental distinction: consumption can satisfy; construction can fulfill.

We can build a relationship, trust, knowledge, a vocation, a community, a more just way of living. We can build within ourselves a greater capacity to perceive, welcome, discern, and love.

These things are not instantaneous. They do not obey perfect schedules. They do not arrive ready-made. They cannot be bought. They require presence, repetition, effort, and patience. And precisely because of that, they can produce something that momentary pleasure cannot: continuity.

A continuity capable of crossing both good days and bad days.

Perhaps this is what we lose when the chair is empty. Not merely a doctrine. Not merely a religion. Not necessarily a particular belief. We lose an axis — something capable of reminding us that there are dimensions of life that cannot be reduced to what we feel right now.

Something capable of saying to desire, “I hear you,” without needing to add, “therefore I will obey.” Something capable of recognizing pleasure without turning it into an end, enduring frustration without concluding that everything has lost meaning, and continuing to walk even when there is no immediate reward.

And perhaps this is why the absence of an inner center is so destabilizing. When everything depends on what we feel at a given moment, life itself begins to oscillate with it.

If I am desired, I have value. If I am rejected, I collapse. If I am recognized, I am well. If I am ignored, I disappear. If I succeed, I am capable. If I fail, I am useless. If I am in love, life has meaning. If I am alone, nothing seems to have meaning. If I am being rewarded, I continue. If the reward takes too long, I give up.

Existence becomes hostage to stimuli.

And the problem is not that these stimuli are irrelevant. They matter. We are affected by the world. We need recognition, care, rest, presence, pleasure, and connection. But none of these things should by itself possess absolute power over our perception of ourselves.

When there is a deeper center, these experiences can touch us without defining us completely.

And perhaps what we call spirituality has precisely a function here — not as external imposition, not as surveillance, not as a mechanism of guilt, but as the capacity to keep open a relationship with what transcends immediate impulse: with meaning, consciousness, hope, what we consider good, and a reality that does not end at the limit of our desires.

For those who believe, this can be lived as a relationship with God. For another person, it may appear as reverence before life, ethical commitment, openness to mystery, a search for truth, a sense of belonging to the cosmos, or responsibility before others.

The language may vary.

The fundamental question remains: is there something in me capable of recognizing that my desire is not the final measure of reality?

When that answer disappears, the chair is empty.

And desire sits down.

Not out of malice.

Out of availability.

Perhaps that is why the task is not to wage war against desire. It is to inhabit the center again — to recover within ourselves some living instance capable of ordering without mutilating.

A consciousness that does not hate the body. A reason that does not despise feelings. A spirituality that does not demand the amputation of the human. A relationship with pleasure that does not turn it into a master. A hope that does not depend exclusively on the next reward.

And then something begins to change.

We no longer need to live only from peaks. We can begin to recognize value also in continuity, in construction, in presence, in trust, in the path, in what remains.

Perhaps happiness is less what we feel when we finally obtain everything we wanted and more what begins to be born when we no longer need to obtain everything we want in order to remain whole.

And at this point, an even deeper question arises: if what should occupy this center cannot be merely desire, nor reason alone, nor a rule imposed from outside, what exactly within us can perform this function without dividing us?

Perhaps this is where we need to look again at what we are — not as parts in conflict, but as one whole being.

IV. Whole Before Integrity

Perhaps this is precisely where the reflection needs to change planes.

If desire cannot occupy the center of existence by itself, and if reason is also not enough when it becomes merely a technique for justifying what we already want, then perhaps it is necessary to return to a more elementary question:

What are we, after all?

Perhaps an important part of our suffering comes from the fact that we learned to answer this question in fragments.

We are body, mind, feelings, memory, desire, consciousness, intuition, imagination. We are what some traditions call soul. We are openness to something greater than ourselves.

And none of these dimensions exists in isolation. They pass through one another.

Feelings may be one of the best images of this integration. They have a body: they alter breathing, heart rate, muscles, posture, sleep, appetite. They have chemistry, memory, language, interpretation. But they also seem to touch a region within us that cannot easily be reduced to any of these elements.

Longing can be felt in the chest. Fear can close the throat. Joy can alter the entire way we perceive an afternoon. A hurt can remain in the body for years. Love can change the disposition with which we cross reality.

Perhaps feelings are precisely a kind of atmosphere of our existence. They are not simply “in the head,” nor are they merely organic reactions without meaning. They are colors, contrasts, nuances — movements that connect what we are biologically with what we perceive, remember, desire, interpret, and endow with meaning.

For this reason, trying to radically separate body, mind, emotion, and spirituality may be an artificial task from the beginning.

We are whole beings.

And this is different from saying that we are people of integrity.

Wholeness is a condition. Integrity is a construction.

We are whole because we come into existence composed of different dimensions that form one single life. We become people of integrity when we manage to make these dimensions coexist without requiring some to destroy, dominate, or deny the others.

This difference matters, because perhaps part of what we call the spiritual path has for a long time been presented as a process of amputation: remove, deny, repress, abandon, distrust, mortify, separate.

The body against the spirit. The flesh against the soul. Desire against holiness. The world against God. Pleasure against virtue. Matter against the sacred.

But a spirituality permanently based on this opposition risks producing exactly what it wishes to overcome: inner division.

A divided person may even obey.

But they will hardly be whole.

It is evident that desires may need limits. Impulses may need regulation. There are habits that harm us, pleasures that can become destructive, choices that hurt other people, behaviors that need to be reviewed. None of this disappears when we defend wholeness.

The question is how we do this work.

There is a profound difference between educating a desire and hating it; between disciplining the body and considering it impure; between recognizing limits and living permanently at war with oneself; between learning responsibility and being convinced that our very existence is a problem.

Perhaps a healthier formulation is this: the body does not need to be defeated; it needs to be integrated.

Desire does not need to be eliminated; it needs to be understood and oriented. Feelings do not need to be silenced; they need to be heard without becoming sovereign. Reason does not need to control everything; it needs to illuminate, compare, and discern. Spirituality does not need to deny our humanity; it needs to help it flourish.

And perhaps this is particularly important within the Christian tradition itself, because there is something profoundly significant in the fact that Christianity is organized around the idea of incarnation.

God is not presented only as a distant reality demanding that the human being abandon the human condition in order to reach Him. The central narrative speaks of God assuming flesh, entering time, feeling hunger, tiredness, pain, affection, fear, friendship, grief, joy.

If there is any strength in this image, it seems to point less toward the denial of the human and more toward its dignification.

This does not mean that every human will is automatically good, nor that every experience should be followed. It means only that our humanity cannot be treated as an unfortunate accident that must be overcome so that we may finally become spiritual.

Perhaps it is precisely the opposite.

Perhaps spirituality happens within the human condition: in the body, in relationship, in limitation, in vulnerability, in choice, in care, in the way we treat what exists.

And this also changes the way we can think about faith.

For a long time, we learned to identify spirituality almost immediately with institutional religion, as though faith were a kind of service granted to certain historical structures that held the legitimate means of access to the divine. The institution would teach, interpret, define, authorize — and the person would receive.

But perhaps it is necessary to distinguish things that can walk together without being identical.

Religion and spirituality can meet profoundly. A religious tradition can offer language, memory, symbols, music, community, rites, accumulated wisdom, practices of prayer, criteria of discernment, stories of people who spent centuries facing questions similar to ours. All of this can be precious.

But a tradition does not need to own what it seeks to transmit.

The map can be extraordinary.

Still, it is not the owner of the territory.

Perhaps this is one of the most delicate points, because criticizing the institutionalization of faith does not require denying everything religious institutions have preserved. That would be another simplification.

There is beauty. There is wisdom. There are extraordinary testimonies. There are people who found in these paths a profound capacity to love, serve, care, resist violence, and rebuild lives.

But there has also been control, fear, guilt, silencing, abuse of power, imposition, separation among human groups, hierarchies transformed into measures of value.

And perhaps spiritual maturity is precisely the ability to look at this inheritance without needing to choose between idolizing it or destroying it: to discern, preserve what produces life, review what produces suffering, recognize what was an error, be grateful for what was care, and continue walking.

Perhaps the very image of the Holy Spirit helps here.

In the Christian tradition, the Spirit does not appear as the property of an institution. The Spirit precedes the institution. It is movement, breath, inspiration, presence — that which animates, calls, unsettles, consoles, and causes something new to be born.

And perhaps it is important to recover this dimension.

Not to replace every criterion with personal feeling, because that would simply be another extreme. “I felt it, therefore it is true” can be just as problematic as “the authority said it, therefore it is true.”

An intuition does not become infallible because it was born within us. An intense experience is not automatically sacred. A strong feeling can illuminate; it can also confuse.

That is why inspiration needs to walk together with discernment.

Perhaps we can ask about its fruits. Does this inspiration make me more capable of loving? Does it increase my humility? Does it make me more responsible? Does it expand my capacity to care? Does it help me recognize dignity in those who think differently? Does it make me more open to reality? Does it allow me to revise my own conclusions? Does it integrate my body or put me at war against it? Does it produce freedom or dependence? Does it produce communion or a need for superiority?

Perhaps this is one of the oldest and simplest criteria: not only to ask where some inspiration seems to come from, but to observe what it causes to be born.

And this also allows us to broaden the very field of spirituality.

One person may find this openness through Christian prayer. Another through meditation. Another through silence. Another through nature. Another in art. Another in a different religious tradition. Another may not even be able to call it God, but may experience reverence, responsibility, mystery, belonging, and ethical commitment before existence.

The language may vary.

This does not mean that all conceptions are identical. They are not.

But perhaps it is possible to recognize that the human experience of openness to what transcends the self is greater than any single vocabulary.

This matters because sometimes we confuse absence of religion with absence of depth, and we also confuse presence of religion with presence of spirituality.

Neither equivalence is necessary.

A person may not believe in God and still possess profound reverence for life, responsibility toward others, and the capacity to move beyond the center of the self. Another may rigorously observe religious practices and still remain completely governed by pride, resentment, desire for power, and contempt.

Perhaps the deeper question is another:

Is there something in me that recognizes that I am not the final measure of all things?

Something that calls me beyond myself. Something that obliges me to consider the other. Something that reminds me that my desire does not exhaust reality. Something that invites me to answer for the impact of my presence in the world.

For those who believe, this can be recognized as God, as Spirit, as divine presence, as vocation.

And perhaps this openness is more important than the ability to correctly repeat a formula, because spirituality, if it is alive, must touch existence. It must appear in the way we look, treat, decide, ask forgiveness, deal with what we do not understand, react to suffering, use power, and treat those who can offer us nothing.

And perhaps there is here an equally necessary distinction between responsibility and guilt.

Responsibility can be liberating. It says: “I did something that caused harm. I need to acknowledge it. I need to repair it. I need to learn. I can do differently.”

Permanent guilt says something else: “There is something essentially wrong with me. I am unworthy. I am insufficient by nature. I need to prove that I deserve to be loved.”

When this second logic becomes dominant, the spiritual path can turn into an infinite debt. The person stops seeking growth because they love the good and begins seeking approval because they fear condemnation.

There is an enormous difference between these two things.

Perhaps love produces a very different anthropology.

Not: “Make yourself worthy so that you may then be loved.”

But: “Recognize yourself as loved and allow that love to make you more capable of loving.”

This inversion changes the point of departure.

Transformation no longer begins in contempt for what we are. It begins in care. It does not require that we destroy ourselves so that we may be rebuilt. It invites us to understand, order, mature, repair, integrate.

And perhaps it is precisely here that the word transfiguration acquires a more precise meaning.

To transfigure is not to transform the human into another species of being. It is not to stop feeling, stop desiring, stop having a body, or abandon the world.

It is to allow what we already are to be reorganized by a more conscious relationship with the good.

The body remains body. Desire remains desire. Reason remains reason. Feelings remain feelings. Spirituality remains open to mystery.

But no dimension needs to live at war with the others.

Nothing needs to be expelled. Nothing needs to be deified.

Perhaps this is what an integrated existence seeks.

Not perfection.

Living coherence.

A way of inhabiting oneself without amputation.

And then that initial distinction reappears in another way: we are whole before we even know how to live as whole beings. Integrity may be the learning of remaining whole while orienting what we are toward the good.

It is not about reaching a state in which there will never again be contradiction. Perhaps such a state does not even exist. It is about learning to recognize our own contradictions without turning one of them into a definitive identity.

I can feel anger without becoming nothing but anger. I can desire something inappropriate without becoming my desire. I can make a mistake without reducing myself to the mistake. I can be afraid without being governed by fear. I can pass through doubt without losing every possibility of faith. I can recognize a wound without building my entire existence around it.

And perhaps this is a very concrete form of hope:

what exists within us can be integrated without needing to be denied.

And when we begin to experience this within, perhaps we also begin to produce less separation outside.

Whoever lives permanently divided tends to divide the world. Whoever has learned to hate parts of themselves may feel the need to condemn them when they appear in others. Whoever only knows value through hierarchy may need to place someone above and someone below. Whoever has learned that love depends on merit may also make the love they offer conditional.

Inner fragmentation becomes collective fragmentation.

Perhaps this is why caring for our own wholeness is never merely a private undertaking. The way we organize ourselves within inevitably appears in the way we inhabit the world.

And this is precisely where the next step arises.

Recognizing what fragmented us can awaken indignation, anger, and a desire for justice. All of this can be legitimate.

But one decisive question remains:

What will we do with what we can now see?

Will we turn consciousness into resentment?

Or will we manage to make awakening the source of another way of being present?

Perhaps transfiguration begins precisely in this choice.

V. Awakening Without Reproducing the Wound

Recognizing what fragmented us can bring relief, but it can also bring anger.

When we begin to perceive mechanisms that diminished us, beliefs that made us suffer, relationships that wounded us, institutions that failed, expectations that deformed us, or structures that helped keep people in suffering, indignation naturally appears. Sometimes even a kind of vertigo appears: How did I not see this before? Why did they do this to me? Why was it taught this way? Who was responsible?

These questions are not illegitimate. Some of them need to be asked. There are stories that demand recognition, harms that need to be named, responsibilities that must not be erased in the name of a false peace, injustices that need to be corrected.

The problem begins when what awakened our consciousness starts reorganizing our entire existence around resentment.

At that point, the past continues to govern.

We change position, but we still revolve around what wounded us. Before, we obeyed; afterward, we may begin to hate. Before, we submitted; afterward, we may feel the need to destroy. Before, there was fear; afterward, contempt appears.

The polarity has changed.

The center, perhaps, has not.

That is why awakening must be greater than reaction.

Perhaps a truly deep transformation happens when we manage to understand what wounded us without needing to make the wound our permanent source of identity and action.

This does not mean forgiving automatically, forgetting, accepting again what was unjust, remaining in environments that harm us, or turning violence into a pedagogical experience. Some things were simply bad, and they need to be recognized as bad.

But there is a difference between carrying memory and living submitted to memory. There is a difference between doing justice and needing revenge, between protecting oneself and becoming hardened, between leaving a structure that harmed us and building our entire identity in opposition to it.

Perhaps love enters precisely here.

Not as sentimentality. Not as passivity. Not as an obligation to tolerate what destroys us. But as a choice not to allow violence to determine the form of our response.

Love can be firm. It can say no, establish distance, end a relationship, denounce, correct, demand reparation, refuse an unjust practice.

What it does not need to do is dehumanize.

Perhaps this is one of the hardest differences to sustain, because when we are wounded, we often wish to remove from the other exactly what we feel was removed from us: dignity, listening, understanding, possibility of change, humanity.

And so the logic repeats itself.

The people change.

The mechanism remains.

Perhaps awakening in love is precisely to interrupt this transmission: not to return to the world exactly what we received, not because we are morally superior, but because we understand the cost of repetition.

Patience also gains another meaning here. It is not resignation. It is recognizing that certain transformations need time.

Our own consciousness does not change completely at the instant we perceive something. We can understand a pattern rationally and still repeat it emotionally. We can know that a certain reaction harms us and still react that way. We can recognize an unjust belief and notice months later that it is still hidden in some behavior. We can deeply desire change and continue stumbling over old habits.

This does not invalidate the process.

Perhaps it is precisely the process.

Human transformation rarely happens in a straight line. There are advances and returns. There are days of enormous clarity and others when we go back to reacting almost as before.

And perhaps self-care is indispensable precisely in these moments, because there is a form of consciousness that can become cruel.

After we discover something about ourselves, we begin to demand perfection: “Now I know, so I can no longer make mistakes. If I repeated it, I failed. If I felt anger, I did not evolve. If I relapsed, everything was useless.”

This logic merely replaces one tribunal with another.

It does not free us.

It only changes the judge.

Perhaps we also need to learn to look at our own process with mercy — not to use mercy as an excuse, but in order to be able to continue. To acknowledge, repair when necessary, learn, reorient, and keep going.

A fall does not need to destroy the journey. A mistake does not need to erase what has already been built. An impulsive reaction does not need to become an identity.

What matters may be what happens afterward.

Do we awaken? Do we acknowledge? Can we look again? Do we want to continue?

If the answer is yes, the path remains open.

And then justice and love can finally stop seeming like adversaries.

Justice says, “This needs to be put in order.” Love asks, “How can this be done without destroying gratuitously?” Courage says, “We cannot go on like this.” Patience answers, “Not everything will be transformed today.” Self-care reminds us, “You too are among those whose dignity needs to be protected.” And hope adds, “There is still a path.”

Perhaps this is what allows transformation not to become merely reaction.

Reaction remains bound to the stimulus. It depends on what it reacts against.

Purpose works differently.

It does not ask only, “What do I need to fight?”

It also asks, “What do I want to bring into existence?”

This change seems small, but perhaps it is decisive.

There is a profound difference between living to defeat what we hate and living to build what we love. In the first form, the enemy continues determining our direction. In the second, something new begins to orient our steps.

Perhaps one of the deepest forms of freedom is precisely this:

to stop allowing the wound to determine what we will produce with our own life.

We did not choose many of the things that happened to us. We did not choose the time into which we were born, all the structures we inherited, or all the wounds we received. We cannot return to the past and change them.

But perhaps there is one choice that remains open:

what what we have lived through will continue to produce through us.

We can transmit the same rigidity or interrupt it. We can reproduce the same contempt or learn another way of looking. We can continue classifying people or recognize singularity. We can turn suffering into a justification for hurting, or allow it to increase our capacity to perceive the pain of the person beside us.

None of these changes happens all at once.

But perhaps this is how transfiguration begins to take form.

Not as spectacle. Not as a magical instant after which we become another person. But as a succession of small reorientations: one more second before answering; a word we choose not to say; a person we manage to see differently; a limit we finally establish; an apology; help offered; a reaction we do not repeat; a silent choice that perhaps no one notices.

These are small movements.

But perhaps this is exactly how an existence changes direction.

And there is something profoundly important in this: we do not need to hate what we have overcome in order to keep choosing what we love.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful marks of an awakening that has truly matured.

The past ceases to be erased, but it also ceases to be sovereign. Justice remains necessary, but it no longer needs cruelty. Memory remains, but it is no longer a prison. The wound exists, but it no longer decides by itself.

And then the good ceases to be only a response to evil. It ceases to exist only as reaction.

It begins to acquire an origin of its own.

Perhaps this is what it means to begin living not only against what wounded us, but in favor of what we recognize as worthy of existing.

Perhaps this is where transfiguration becomes conscious: not when we distance ourselves from reality, but when we return to inhabit it with another intention, with what we have, with what we are, with what we have lived.

Without waiting for perfection. Without denying our contradictions. Without abandoning the desire for justice. But trying to ensure that, little by little, our presence introduces into the world less violence, less humiliation, less discard, less fragmentation — and more care, more consciousness, more tenderness, more responsibility, more courage, more love.

Perhaps collective transformation begins exactly there:

when what we reorganize within ourselves begins to alter, even discreetly, the spaces we inhabit.

VI. The Journey Has Begun

And perhaps I can end this reflection precisely from myself.

Everything I have written here is already, for me, a reason for joy. Not because I have reached some definitive conclusion, much less because I have attained that ideal state we so often learn to pursue. It is something simpler and, at the same time, deeper: perceiving these things, being able to think about them, organize them, put them into words, and offer them to someone already produces in me meaning, openness, hope, and fulfillment.

This matters because this path is not easy.

Knowing ourselves, reviewing what we inherited, perceiving our automatisms, reordering desires, caring for wounds, learning to love better, making our reason more lucid, our feelings more integrated, and our spirituality more alive is not a program to be completed in a few stages. There is no universal timetable for this. There is no fixed number of weeks, exercises, or techniques capable of guaranteeing an integral human transformation.

And perhaps recognizing this, far from being bad news, is precisely a relief.

Because it means that we can finally take from our shoulders the obligation to become an ideal version of ourselves within a given deadline.

We do not need to present results to God. We do not need to appear before life with a performance report. We do not need to be healed of everything, to have understood everything, overcome every contradiction, controlled every impulse, or never again experience anger, sadness, fear, disordered desire, tiredness, or relapse.

Perhaps what God, the Holy Spirit, Divinity, the Orisha — or whatever we recognize as greater or higher than ourselves — really needs from us is something far less spectacular:

willingness.

The willingness to begin.

And, when we fall, the willingness to continue.

There is also a beautiful place for desire in all of this. Not the desire that tries to turn the world into an object of satisfaction, but desire oriented toward another direction: the desire to walk, to learn, to do good to others and to ourselves, to remain open to what can make us more whole.

And one thing I have been perceiving is that the first fruits begin to appear long before we imagine that we have “arrived” anywhere.

They are small things: a reaction that no longer happens exactly as it would have before; a word we manage not to say; a person we begin to see differently; a suffering of our own that we manage to welcome without immediately condemning ourselves; an unexpected joy at having managed to understand something; a new desire to care; a hope that quietly reappears after a long time.

Perhaps they seem like small achievements when seen from the outside.

But when they happen within us, they expand.

They begin to fill spaces that we once tried to occupy with other things. And then the path itself begins to nourish the path: a small change produces encouragement; encouragement produces hope; hope generates openness; openness allows another change.

Little by little, almost without noticing, something begins to breathe again within us.

That is also why I deeply believe that, whenever possible, we should not walk alone.

Not because we are incapable as individuals, but because we need one another. We need someone who reminds us of what we decided when the noise of the world makes us forget. Someone before whom we can speak without needing to appear ready. Someone with whom we can share a discovery, a doubt, a fall, and also that small joy that perhaps no one else would understand.

It can be one person. It can be a community. It can be a friendship.

And alongside this there can be prayer, supplication, silence, contemplation, conversation with God — or simply the inner permission to direct a word toward what each person recognizes as greater than themselves.

Jesus. God. The Spirit. Buddha. The cosmos. Our own consciousness before the mystery of life.

Perhaps the first spiritual gesture is simply this:

to allow ourselves.

To allow ourselves to consider that perhaps we are not alone inside an absurd and mute reality. To allow ourselves to listen. To allow ourselves to receive inspiration. To allow ourselves not to know. To allow ourselves to begin.

And, above all, to allow ourselves to fail without turning failure into a sentence.

A moment of anger does not destroy the path. A relapse does not erase everything that has already been built. A contradiction does not invalidate a sincere desire for transformation.

To fall does not mean returning to the starting point.

Because someone who falls after having walked no longer falls in the same inner place as someone who had not yet begun.

There is consciousness. There is memory. There is experience. There is a possibility of return.

And perhaps this is what I would like to testify to:

change can walk alongside our imperfections.

We do not need to wait until we are perfect in order to begin living better.

Peace can appear while conflicts still exist. Hope can be born while we still feel fear. Love can grow while we are still learning how to love. Happiness can begin while life remains incomplete.

Perhaps transfiguration does not happen at the moment when we eliminate everything we consider imperfect in ourselves. Perhaps it begins when we stop dividing ourselves into worthy and unworthy parts, sacred and condemned parts, parts that deserve to exist and parts that should disappear.

Because we are not a collection of defective pieces trying finally to form someone acceptable.

We are whole beings.

And it is as whole beings — with body, reason, feelings, desire, consciousness, spirituality, falls, learning, hope, and love — that we continue walking.

Perhaps it is precisely this way that, little by little, we also learn to become people of integrity.

It has begun. Let us awaken to Consciousness in Essential Love

September Equinox, September 22, 2026, at 9:05 PM BRT