End of April 1858, Alençon, a Normandy town. The young lacemaker Zelie Guerin is passing on the St.Leonard bridge. Since some time she is meditating on her vocation: she wanted to become a nun, but she was refused by the convent. She gradually approaches the vocation to marriage. On the bridge, the girl crosses an elegant watchmaker from her neighborhood, Louis Martin. Immediately she believes to hear a voice: "That 's the one I have prepared to you." The young people get acquainted with each other: "Their agreement is sudden and total, as if they had known each other for a long time"; after three months they get married. They are the parents of St. Therese of Jesus Child. Again, the voice spoke in an way extraordinarily fitting a reality which Zelie could not yet be aware of.
Zelie Guerin and Louis Martin, parents of St.Therese of Jesus Child
But such incidents are narrated by people coming from very different cultures. In recent weeks I have been reading the great book by Japanese Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, which explains how to permanently rearrange and fix homes. An extraordinary book, which has also deep spiritual meanings: rearranging means above all getting rid of superfluous things, tidying up our own lives and priorities, purifying ourselves. The author relates that, at some point in her experience, she had not yet managed to find the right method to get rid of unnecessary items:
"In three years of compulsive reorganization I should have been able to get rid of all of mine unnecessary items: instead, in that room, I was more uncomfortable than ever. I fell on the floor and, sitting cross-legged with one arm folded under my head, I began to think: "Can anyone tell me what I did wrong? I have been working so much ... Why is my room still a mess? ". Although I had never uttered these words aloud, my heart - attached to a thread of hope - was screaming. At that moment, I had the impression that my room echoed a voice saying: "Watch your things better".
After falling asleep and waking up, Marie realized that she had to choose the things that were really valuable, important to her. In short, in this case the voice was heard at a crucial time, to indicate the right path. Kondo is Japanese, very far from European or Judeo-Christian culture (she should be Shinto) and yet such fundamental experience happened to her too. I think no one would connect it with a hallucination, since her work is exceptional and the author was included in Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of the planet.
I experienced the same too on two occasions: the first one on March 2001, the second on April - May 2014 (in my case, however, they were "clusters" of perceptions: the "voice" showed up two or three times in a span of a few weeks while I was meditating deeply on my life). Having lived this experience from the inside, I can confirm that it has absolutely nothing to do with a hallucination. I was well aware that the idea did not come from me: it was a kind of external input, respectfully suggested from the outside and turning into an exact phrase in my mind. The mechanism of formation is very clear, transparent and does not induce any confusion.
Despite the curiosity of my student of 3O Dario (!), I can not report yet what happened on 2014; however, on March 24, 2001, I was on my way to a meeting about the correspondence with death row inmates. But I was late (45 minutes!), tired, I was feeling unwell, it was cold (it was a bad day, wet and windy) and I had to walk to the meeting place, located in a village outside Fribourg on the top of a climb that never ended: in fact, at one point, seeing the tower of the Fribourg Cathedral among the bare branches of the trees, I decided: "I'm going back home." At that point, an inner voice (firm, authoritative) objected: "No, you go ahead." "But no, I'm going back home," I objected. Again, the voice insisted: "No, you go ahead." I could not disobey. I sighed and went ahead: after some time I found the building of the meeting. That day I decided to join the program and it is one of the best decisions I ever made. That volunteering was a wonderful experience: it opened to me new dimensions, even creative ones. (it goes on)
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