Quintessenceway: Before the World Awakens, the Heart Must
(A essay I wrote for my spiritual friend Carmen’s service, yes — but one rooted in bodily transformation, artistic revelation, and the hard honesty of seeing oneself clearly.
Website: https://quintessenceway.com)
The world has changed.
Or perhaps it has only revealed itself.
There was a day when I came to my mentor with my manuscript, carrying it like something alive, something I had been nursing in the dark. He read it, sighed, and told me my writing was a mess.
Not a novel, he seemed to mean. Too dense. Too essayistic. Too buried beneath itself.
At first, I could not understand him. My book was never meant to be an essay. It was a living world. Everything was already there: the sadness of a man, the rebellion of a woman, the children no longer naïve, the animals returning during lockdown, nature regrowing while the human world retreated indoors.
The core was there.
So why had it not surfaced?
Why was the wholeness hidden beneath so many layers? Why did the novel feel like an essay when what I had written was, in truth, a cry?
Something was blocking me.
I wanted to reclaim my authorship, but I did not yet know how. I could feel the book breathing beneath the prose, but I could not clear enough space for it to speak.
This is where Carmen’s Quintessenceway entered my life — not as a slogan, not as a shallow self-help phrase, but as a mirror.
Through her service, a person offers their name, date of birth, and email address, and receives in return a quintessence message tailored to them: a message rooted in the architecture of feeling, thought, action, and connection. It is a way of seeing the self not as a fixed object, but as a living pattern. A movement. A balance. A truth waiting to be recognised.
Then, under the guidance of my friend Carmen, the architecture of quintessence began to take form.
Feelings.
Thoughts.
Actions.
Connections.
Four elements. Four movements. Four gates.
When they fall out of balance, the self fractures. When they return to harmony, wholeness returns too.
And is this not what has happened to our world?
What else is the present crisis, if not the consequence of a great imbalance?
Feelings have been left undealt with for too long. Men, unable to face their fear, grief, and loss of power, turn toward the manosphere, toward fantasies of dominance, toward the worship of strongman politicians. Day after day, the politicians become giant babies, and the people follow them into infancy.
Thought has been misdirected. It is constantly steered away from the true core of life, from the force that holds everyone together: love, humanity, tenderness, language. Bloggers speak of optimisation. Teachers are pushed to prioritise maths and technology over the first miracle in a child’s eyes when they discover a snail on a spring leaf. The first knife thrust by education departments is often aimed at the humanities, at language, at the very arts that protect us from being eaten alive.
Actions drift too far from kindness. Too many are left unexplained, unexamined, detached from empathy at the core. The cold eyes of vegan yogis toward colleagues who refuse to give up meat. Educated blue-collar young men who carry essentialist ideas about gender, only to be laughed at until they turn toward Jordan Peterson or Charlie Kirk. A once pro-feminist Black Christian girl, the tenth child in her family, speaks of the pressure of childbearing, of “deep” philosophies she does not understand, and is sneered at by her white teacher. The cry she never speaks aloud hardens. In the end, she turns toward Christian fundamentalism.
Again and again, one side looks at the other as if they are beneath them.
Each contempt creates a counterforce. Each sneer pushes away someone who might have become an ally. Each unexamined wound becomes a doctrine. Each private insecurity dresses itself in religion, politics, purity, intellect, or moral superiority, until one branch begins to hate another.
And now we have arrived at a stage where the the light given the Morning Star, the fire stolen by Prometheus — threatens to leave the world.
Once connection is lost, we stand at the apex of civilisation and at the bottom of the animal order. The fire is still here, yes. But without love, without thought, without feeling, without connection, it turns into pure evil’s communion wine.
What can we do, then?
What can we do?
This has been a long rhetorical question for me as a writer. There was a time when I asked it and found no answer.
In my own book, during the first draft, when my mentor sighed and said it was “too essayistic,” I could not understand him. I thought: But it is not an essay. It was never meant to be an essay.
Only later, after I received the wisdom scrolls, each one distilled from theosophical canons, did I begin to see the cracks between the lines.
The big names I tried so hard to place in a chapter? That was my unchecked ego, the ego of someone who had graduated from a Russell Group university and still feared being dismissed.
The over-the-top intensity? That was the ghost of an ugly duckling — the girl bullied for eighteen years in China — still haunting my mind.
The five metaphors in a row that made my prose unbearably purple? That was my fear of being seen as empty inside, of being thought intellectually lesser.
The layers began to fall as the onion unfurled.
Had I not come to understand quintessence — that pulsing dot, invisible as air, fluctuating as water, warm as fire, and virile as earth; the power that keeps the inner universe breathing — I would never have heard my characters’ voices so clearly.
Once the masks fell, they began to speak.
The man whispered years of victimhood inside a coercive marriage, and years of being made a mule beneath an imperial machine.
The Cossacks were no longer cultural mascots or horse-riders in costume. They became people as simple and alive as someone screaming back at a neighbour’s horse because the horse screamed first — just as an American teenager might meow back at a cat because the cat meowed at them.
And the woman became whole. Brilliant and cruel. Feral and fine. Dirty and decent. Yet through all her virtues and vices, compassion and kindness remained the driving force.
Then came a sudden click in my head, a return to Rumi’s insight:
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
In the name of changing the world, the world has been tipped toward the edge of falling apart.
What have we failed to manage, even for a second?
In pursuing what looks exhilarating, rewarding, illuminating, we overlook the shadow part: the darkness before light is born.
This morning, even my neighbour said that, for spirits, this might be the worst time since the Second World War.
I switched off my iPad. I had just finished the day’s writing. I mulled over his sentence with a smile.
What we see in this reality may indeed be the nadir.
But as long as we are breathing, as long as someone is still able to say such a line, light is still here.
It is just an inch beyond what we can see.
It is waiting at the height where possibility and regrowth begin.
As the thought completed itself, I heard my characters singing at the back of my head. And I knew then that this was a revelation worth sharing: the knowledge of quintessence, the link to Quintessenceway, the place where each person can offer their name, date of birth, and email address, and receive in return a quintessence message tailored by my friend Carmen — and the understanding that the world does not awaken through domination.
It awakens through the heart.
Once the heart is awake, the world will be awake.
And whoever holds their hands over us through fear, hatred, or domination will become as weak as smoke.
Below is a taste of wisdom, and a pledge to the journey of light’s return.
Rumi
“Yesterday I was smart and wanted to change the world. Today I am wise — and I change myself.”
Augustine of Hippo
“Pride is the beginning of all sin.”
Confucius
“A wise man looks for his own faults; a foolish man looks for them in others.”
Socrates
“He who thinks he knows enough already knows nothing.”
The Path of Quintessence
Before you can change the world, you must see who you truly are.
The Mirror of Truth is the first law of transformation.
Pride is a distorted mirror.
Complacency is a silent poison.
The Path of Quintessence is movement, and anyone who stops moving loses the light.
By despising others, you despise a part of the truth within yourself.
