He would later place all of his experience within a guru myth. He described himself as having been “mentally unstable” and full of “doubts about my life.” In connection with such doubts, he described “a conflict between self-confidence and an inferiority complex.” Then came his heroic spiritual quest: “One day I stopped fooling myself altogether and thought: ‘What am I living for? Is there anything absolute, does true happiness really exist in this world? If so, can I get it?’ I did not realize at this point that what my soul was looking for was enlightenment. But I couldn’t sit still. Urged by such restlessness, I started a blind search. It was an intense feeling; it was a faith.”
Many people in such situations, he further explained, would simply change jobs or “just disappear.” In him, however, there “awoke … the desire to seek after the ultimate, the unchanging, and I began groping for an answer.” His spiritual journey, he tells us, meant “discarding everything … everything that I had” and required “great courage and faith, and great resolution.” The emerging guru had found a way to heal himself and could embark on “a long and arduous eight years of practice” on the road to enlightenment.