Having been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety was one of the most revealing events of my life, because it helped me understand many things that — until that moment — seemed to me either trivial or extraordinary.
Let me explain: I considered my obsession with books, artists, movies, projects, or people normal. Perhaps not common, but yes within the spectrum of the normal. At the same time, my compulsions, which as I described in the previous episode consisted of involuntary movements, superstitious rituals, and biting my nails, did seem strange, uncomfortable, and embarrassing to me.
After researching the condition I was diagnosed with, I learned that OCD is relatively uncommon, with barely 1.2% of adults diagnosed[1]. The problem is that the statistic I found was based on studies conducted in the United States. Then I found some studies from the year 2000 in Colombia, and to my surprise, in my country the condition affects three times as much of the population, with 3.6% of the total[2].
Most of my research at that time focused on the characteristics of the condition and strategies to control my anxiety crisis. I did not delve further into the statistical part, but with what I found, it was already possible for me to draw some conclusions: The first was something I suspected: living in a country with so much violence considerably increased the possibility of suffering from some mental health problem.
The second conclusion has to do with that double manifestation of OCD in those of us who live with it: the obsessions and the compulsions. As I mentioned a moment ago, obsessions seemed normal to me, but being honest, I could say they made me feel proud. In contrast, compulsions caused me discomfort and shame, but in reality both aspects are two sides of the same coin.
Then I realized that that very unbalanced perception largely reflected the worldview of the Western world, especially in Colombia, on the one hand, about what is considered normal or desirable and, on the other, about what causes us shame. We live in a culture in which obsessing is seen as something positive: We admire the “geniuses” who do not rest until they achieve something extraordinary, who sacrifice hours of sleep and leisure to reach their goals, what in Colombia we call “garra.”
This is more evident in the business world, particularly with the myth of the entrepreneur. Whoever builds their own company is expected to give themselves 100% to their project, to sacrifice the time they would otherwise dedicate to their family, and to learn to get up from the falls as many times as necessary until they achieve their goal.
I have seen it very frequently on the famous American television show “Shark Tank,” of which I believe some versions have been made in Latin America. In many episodes one can see that one of the gravest sins that the entrepreneur presenting their project can commit is declaring that they are including a decent salary among the expenses of their company.
Other times, the “sharks” flog them for lack of “hustle,” which in Colombian Spanish I would translate as “darse la pela” or “sacrificio.” The entrepreneur cannot rest on weekends, take vacations, or sit around waiting for things to happen. Like a high-performance athlete, he must program himself to win and leave everything else in the background.
Logically, being obsessive about work, study, goals, parental approval, or the boss's favor is something that in our capitalist world is stimulated and rewarded. Obsessive people can be the best salespeople, employees, and above all customers that a company can have. The problem is that the price of that personality trait is a very high tendency toward anxiety.
The reason is that obsessions, like addictions, are not based on achieving some goal, but on pursuing it indefinitely. The tragedy of those of us who tend to obsess is that we believe the obsession is a temporary stage, that it will end once we have obtained whatever it is we are looking for.
But what really happens is that once we have achieved that goal, we immediately look for a new goal to pursue. Well, this is something that not only describes obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in some way affects almost all of us who live in the modern capitalist model. Of course, for those of us who deal with OCD, that incessant search for “projects,” hobbies, tasks, or routines is more evident and destructive.
The other important difference with “normal” obsession is the matter of compulsions, which are that other side of the OCD coin. They are called compulsions because they are acts, generally repetitive, over which one has very little control. They are not necessarily involuntary because one can choose not to do them, but it feels as if, by avoiding them, a pressure grows inside that is only relieved by letting them be.
As I said before, I have had many compulsions throughout my life. Some of them evidently irrational, but others that would seem normal and even desirable. For example, one of the irrational compulsions I fought against during my childhood was that I often felt the need to make a soft whistle at a particular note and intensity.
I usually did it when I was alone, but sometimes also in front of other people. I knew it was a meaningless impulse, but even so, if I tried to contain it, I felt a tingling in my lips, a general discomfort that unsettled me. So I would bite my lips or rub them hard with my hand, but all I achieved was replacing one compulsion with another. Eventually I gave in to it, or I distracted myself by doing something, and the compulsion faded away, until at some other moment it appeared again.
Then came the religious compulsions, which arose when I felt insecure walking through the streets of Bogotá. To overcome fear, I repeated prayers mentally or crossed myself quickly every few minutes. It was a bit like the typical compulsion associated with OCD, when the person becomes obsessed with germs and dirt and feels they have to wash their hands several times a day and for several minutes to stop being contaminated.
Those are the compulsions that are perceived negatively, because of their irrationality and because they are seen as a waste of time. But there are also the functional compulsions, which are the ones society values positively. In my case, I always saw my obsession with productivity as a virtue, that is, with using time as efficiently as possible.
For example, I have always been very unsettled by having unread messages in my email inbox or in my text messages. My instinct is to immediately respond to the message or complete the task being assigned to me — if it is a work email — and quickly archive or delete the message.
It also happens to me with my personal finances, where I feel the need to manage family expenses by organizing them into categories, controlling them through budgets, and generating monthly reports. It also happens with my photo collection, which is already around 25,000 images. Many people today automatically upload their photos to the cloud with Google Photos or iCloud, but don't look at them again until the app reminds them a year later.
Well, for me it is not so easy: I have my photographs organized in folders by year and month. I frequently review them to delete duplicates, photos that are too similar, or badly taken, and I use an application to tag the people who appear in each photo. If I were a photographer, that compulsion could be seen as part of a functional obsession, but in my case, the hours I invest in this task are hardly compensated in a tangible way.
What all these examples have in common is that, although in appearance those actions correspond to a functional objective, such as being efficient at work, organized in finances, or having an exceptional photo collection, in reality they are compulsions triggered by the obsessions that provoke them.
In the case of my eagerness to answer messages, it is the impulsive response that arises from my obsession with being “up to date,” with not letting something important pass by unnoticed. This obsession also leads me to read the latest news on the topics that interest me most, like the war in Ukraine, the global economy, or advances in artificial intelligence. Likewise, my compulsions of writing down all my expenses and tabulating them, or tagging photos, have to do with my obsession with improving the family economy and optimizing access to my memories, respectively.
But these justifications — being up to date, increasing prosperity, or organizing family memories — are only the “beautified” way of seeing my compulsions. In reality, behind each of them there is a less decorous motivation: the fear of losing control.
The origin of obsession: fear
And the thing is, deep down, the exploration of my obsessions allowed me to see a common denominator, which is the need to feel that I have control over all aspects of my life. My obsession is not being up to date with the news and tasks. It is not missing something important, not disappointing those who trust in me. My obsession is not having more prosperity or better family memories. It is not risking losing money or not finding my valuable memories.
It seems like the same thing, only seeing the glass half empty instead of half full, and in a way it is so. But there is an important difference: obsessions actually do not come from longing but from fear. Many of the things we do every day that seem noble or beneficial, in many cases arise from the fear of losing them and not from love for them.
Understanding this made me change my perspective on many aspects of my life. I realized, for example, that my obsession with listening to my friends and giving them advice arose not only from my interest in their lives and the desire to help, but also from my fear of not being important to them.
Fears, as we have already dealt with extensively on this podcast, are an eminently human characteristic, and I would even say inherent to life, even plant life. The problem is that humans have specialized in accumulating unfounded fears that not only fail to fulfill their supposed objective of keeping us away from danger, but trap us in a cage of limitations that prevents us from living fully, and many times even ends up sinking us into the mud of the very things that fear supposedly wants to protect us from.
But let's get back to obsessions: they arise from specific fears, but what I was able to find reviewing each of them is that behind them, there is always some form of the same primary fear, which is the fear of not having control. The fear of not having control over my friends' affection, over my finances, over my memories, over the day of my death, over what might happen to the people I love, and, as it happened to me, even the fear of not having control over my own acts.
What a damn thing! What led me to lose control of my life in early 2017 was precisely the fear of not having control of my life. And the fear of not having control of life can be summarized in fewer words by saying: “the fear of living.”
Because it would seem that the fear that tormented me at that time, and that still occasionally sends a chill down my spine, was the fear of death: my own or that of the ones I love. But the fear of death is nonsense; we cannot be afraid of something we have never lived, felt, something we cannot imagine and that we will never know either, because when we are dead we will no longer be there to experience what it is like to be dead.
But we do know abandonment, ever since we were cast out of our mothers' wombs after having felt that the universe was only that warm and bountiful matrix that sheltered us. So what we are really afraid of is being born, because every time we feel that we are again in a warm, safe, and reliable place, we know that someday we will be cast out of there and find ourselves again defenseless and blinded by the light of an unknown world.
The “life coaches” — so famous lately — call that warm place we fear being expelled from “the comfort zone.” But I believe it is much more than a zone; it is the universe we believe we inhabit because we created it in our minds by putting together the blocks of control we believe we have over ideas, concepts, resources, people, and situations. Perhaps it has also happened to you that just when you felt everything in your life was fitting together well — good health, a good relationship, a good job, a nice house, and even a pet — then an outbreak of fear appears that sometimes keeps growing and little by little hides behind nonconformity or boredom.
It is the famous fear of things going too well, because as they say, when you reach the summit, the only way is down. That is why we are afraid of happiness: because when we feel it, the fear of losing it can become a much more intense feeling than happiness itself. So better to shake the boat and let the chimera fly away, so that the threat of its abandonment stops tormenting us.
That is the great tragedy that almost all of us humans live through at some point in our lives. Most without even realizing that it is a self-inflicted punishment. For those of us who live with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a bit more dramatic and even comical when one considers how ridiculous the compulsions with which we pretend to appease the implacability of chance can be.
Yuval Noah Harari, of whom you already know I am a great admirer, reflects in his bestseller that Homo Sapiens has evolved to seek happiness, but not to find it. In our DNA the curse of Sisyphus seems to be engraved, that mythical being who was punished by the gods for cheating death and forced to eternally push a boulder uphill, only for it to roll back down every time.
Apparently we are condemned by our own nature, and that condemnation is precisely what Gautama the Buddha understood sitting under the ficus religiosa tree: we will never be able to find happiness — or enlightenment — as long as we remain trapped in the endless circles of attachment and rejection, or of desire and fear, which is the other way of seeing it: the desire to control; the fear of losing control.
One of the functions that religion fulfills is precisely helping us bear the burden of this anguish, by giving us the idea of a supreme, benevolent, and omnipotent being who takes charge of those things that are not under our control. As Maria Eugenia, my therapist, knew well when she suggested that I hand over the burden of my sorrows to Jesus Christ. With the help of religion, the anxiety of control should be inversely proportional to the strength of our faith.
That was precisely the conflict I faced in 2017 when I suffered my anxiety crisis. I had spent many years using faith to resolve the existential anguish of not having control over chance. In my childhood and adolescence, it was the Catholic faith that I embraced as a refuge. Then, in my twenties, which is the age at which many of us feel invincible and immortal, I let myself be carried away by that chance, without thinking much about the consequences and simply living one day at a time.
But upon reaching thirty, it was precisely the accumulated anguish of not feeling that I had control over my life that led me to yagé and spirituality. Ayahuasca made me be reborn and embraced me with a renewed sense of security and control that I had not felt since my days in the prayer group with my godfather Diego.
Yagé showed me that my life was predestined for success and happiness, as long as I remained faithful to my new path of service and spiritual work. That was exactly what I needed to believe: that there was a formula, a recipe that if I followed carefully would allow me to achieve what I desired and, by the way, be safe from the dangers that lurk in the world.
But with the passage of time, that new faith began to deteriorate, just as happened before with religion. Despite how real, powerful, and tangible the mystical message I received at each ceremony was, its effect lasted a little less each time. Furthermore, after starting to have some bad entheogenic trips, I also had to deal with the possibility that those dark and tragic visions were also premonitory.
In other words, I felt I could hand over my trust to the protection of yagé but at the same time fear the punishment if I ever disobeyed its mandates. But there was the catch: I first had to understand, without a doubt, what those rules and obligations were that I had to fulfill so that yagé would keep its promise, but yagé itself made it hard for me by showing me again and again conflicting instructions, if not in frank opposition.
That new search led me to ancestrality, or indigenous spirituality, and ancestrality led me to the Gnosis and other forms of esotericism. Unlike Spirituality, which does not prescribe formulas or require specific practices, esotericism does have recipes, commandments, prohibitions, ceremonies, and rituals. A whole arsenal against the anguish of not having control, and a feast for obsession addicts like me.
On that path I met many people obsessed with the esoteric. Some collected amulets, talismans, and relics; others, books; and the most, shamanic objects, including necklaces, musical instruments, and vestments. I, of course, accumulated a bit of all of the above, at some point reaching the point where the decoration and library of my house were composed for the most part of that kind of thing.
The compulsions were also the order of the day: some friends memorized spells and prayers, even in several languages; others subjected themselves to endless marathons of talking circles and ceremonies. Almost all the elders of the Muisca community acquired the habit of carving their poporos for hours on end, until that became an apparent compulsion: it was a competition of egos chewing coca, sucking ambil, salivating lime, and smearing slime on their gourds, to measure against one another the size of their poporos and in this way estimate which of them had the hardest and biggest spirituality.
Other common compulsions I saw were talking for hours and hours about whatever came out of the mind, without concern for the veracity or coherence of what was said, and also, for some, writing endless pages about equally disorderly and incoherent topics. The clearest example I have of the latter was abuelo Juver, from whom I had in my hands enough material to produce a medium-sized encyclopedia, written in a span of no more than three years.
Samael Aun Weor himself was so prolific that during his public life he published at least 60 books from his own hand. An intellectual fertility that is only achieved when one believes that it is possible to reach the truth by pure divine inspiration and does not waste time researching, contrasting, and editing what is written.
Needless to say, the power plants, including yagé itself, also became compulsions for many. There was someone who drank ayahuasca every eight days, and many who carried a little bottle of ambil and another of hoska, to be able to consume tobacco anywhere and at any time of day.
I tried it with the poporo, but sitting for hours in a single position doing a repetitive task was not my thing. Almost everything else I just listed, on the other hand, was also on my list of compulsions at some point.
Deep down, the world of esotericism is a club of obsessive-compulsives trying to hack life to make it predictable and controllable.
My anxiety arose when I could no longer sustain the magical view of reality that I had been forming for so long. For eight years I explored and studied with all my enthusiasm the mystical knowledge that was within my reach. I met many of the most important elders, knowers, and masters in the field in Colombia. I read books by Samael Aun Weor, Eliphas Levi, Carlos Castañeda, among others, and put their teachings into practice, but in none of those masters — in person or through their books — did I find anything that was real, beyond all doubt of suggestion or credulity.
So far I have talked about how esotericism apparently exacerbated my obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I have not mentioned Spirituality. While I explored and experimented with esotericism, I also came to know flashes of true spirituality hand in hand with Mara, abuelo Luis, Osho, and Buddhism.
And what I learned was that spirituality offered no balm for existential anguish nor a vehicle for obsession. Spirituality invites the observation and acceptance of reality without filters, including the reality of pain, death, and chance. It invites letting go of attachments, not only to material things but even to people, dreams, and even to wisdom itself.
When religion failed and I could no longer keep hiding behind the belief in mystical powers that never quite managed to overcome my skepticism, I found the way out of my torments in two bodies of knowledge that never abandoned me: spirituality and science.
Of the whole heap of techniques and practices I collected during those years, only four are part of my life today: yagé, tobacco hoska, the talking circle, and above all meditation. The first three, in very particular circumstances, but meditation and in general the practice of mindful attention, or mindfulness, has been the only one that so far has shown itself to be a real counterweight to the fear of living, the fear of being born, that led me to my spiritual search.
And in the end, it was a formal science — psychiatry — and not another ancestral wisdom like meditation, that ended up giving me the final push out of the hole I was in. At a time when I didn't know what to believe among so many things I had put into my mind — many of them contradictory with each other — it comforted me greatly to receive a diagnosis based on hundreds of rigorously controlled and contrasted clinical studies.
Because there lies the problem I could never overcome with esotericism: knowing what was right, what I should do or stop doing, implied entrusting my life to faith in a book, in an unknown author, or in some specific master, because most of them have visions that contradict the others. There is no objective way to define who is the best yagé taita, or the author who knows the supreme truths of the Spirit.
That is why there are few options left for the seeker of truth. A few come to mind:
Perhaps you will agree with me that the third option must be the right one. After all, the new age has taught us that supreme wisdom is found in the heart, and that the heart tells us when we have arrived at the right path.
That is the teaching I also received from my masters, and that is why I chose the paths of ancestrality and Buddhism. I chose them the same way I chose Paula as my wife: when my heart told me I was in my home, there I stayed.
So why did I opt for science and not for the teachings of the elders or the shamanism of Castañeda to find inner peace again? Because despite how poetic what I just described about the heart as a guide for choosing the right path is, I was not looking for a loving relationship with wisdom but for the understanding of truth.
In love there are no absolute truths, because people are dynamic and polychromatic processes. There is no scientific method to choose the best partner for you, because the best partner does not exist. What exist are personality traits, thoughts, emotions, and experiences that can bring two people closer or push them apart, but in the end what defines the success or failure of a relationship is not the degree of perfection of those two beings but the will and capacity of both to work on building love around their imperfections.
What I'm going to say now might shock you a bit: the heart is a terrible counselor for knowing the truth. It is not even efficient for love, and that is why in the West the divorce rate is close to 50%, while in India, where most marriages are arranged by the parents, it is less than 2%[3]. One might think it has to do with religious motives or the fact that divorce is socially stigmatized, but the truth is that Indians not only divorce less, but also report greater satisfaction with their marriages than Americans.
So believing that the heart can show us when what we read in a book or what a guru teaches us is true is really naive. No one has been able to demonstrate with convincing evidence the existence of life beyond death, nor of spiritual entities with their own agency that can rob us of our free will, nor of the effectiveness of magical rituals or amulets to cause physical effects or cure diseases.
That is why, to know the truth of life and the universe I chose science, and to unveil the mysteries of the Spirit, I preferred the humility of mindful attention and meditation over the arrogance of the illusion of control that esotericism sold me. My new vision of spirituality is the work of observing the mind in silence and dressing with poetry the profound knowledge of the Universe that science gives us.
This is my quest in Spirituality and Science, and I hope you will keep accompanying me on it.
[1] NIMH » Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (nih.gov)
[2] Prevalencia de trastorno obsesivo compulsivo en adolescentes colombianos y su asociación con la doble condición de trabajo y estudio (scielo.org.co)
[3] Matrimonios «arreglados» se divorcian menos | HuffPost Voices