Your life bears an original sin. In truth, it bears many. But the greatest of them, at least so far, is vanity.

Whenever someone praises you, or even speaks about you, your soul slips free of your body. Your face flushes, your hair falls into disarray, and you surrender yourself to the intoxication of being seen. You measure yourself against other people—against those who possess wealth, influence, and attention—and in doing so, all you discover is your own shallowness, pretension, and restless hunger.

The world keeps urging you onward. You could have rooted yourself beneath the water. You could have stood still like a tower, unmoved. Instead, you allowed yourself to be carried along.

The truth is, you were born to be a plant growing on the riverbed, not a shrimp skimming the surface. You simply do not know it.

Your wisdom and every gift you possess live inside that underwater plant. Yet you cannot enter its body, and so you can never fully inhabit your own.

You drift wherever the current takes you. Your original sin stains your face blue and purple, but you do not know how to resist it. You cry. You scream. You search desperately for the reason your soul keeps abandoning you. Yet all your wisdom remains beneath the surface, and you cannot dive deeply enough to reach it.

So you sever your ties to the world, hoping that distance will return you to yourself. Instead, it only makes you sicker. In your imagination, you construct another world—one a thousand times more vain, more hollow, more frivolous than the one you wished to escape—and eventually you discover that you cannot leave it.

Don't you understand? You are alive for this very second—for the person you are in this moment.

You understand every principle. You could spend two hours explaining them to someone else. They have become what you think of as the instruction manual for your life. But those principles can only guide the self that lives beneath the water. They cannot save the one who is standing here now.

So you remain suspended in midair, helpless and despairing, while day and night stretch endlessly before you.