✨ Introduction
🍷 In this deeply personal reflection, Master Woo Myung shares his past life with alcohol as a companion—a means to escape loneliness, suffering, and unanswered questions about life.
Yet beyond temporary comfort, he reveals a deeper realization: true freedom does not come from numbing pain, but from discovering Truth itself. 🌌
This story is not just about alcohol—it is about the human search for meaning, purpose, and liberation from inner struggles. 🔥
🌌 Original Writing by Master Woo Myung
Alcohol That Was My Companion
The friends of my youth, of long ago,
really loved to drink. I also drank like a fish.
After a glass or two, the countless thoughts and worries
boiling over in my head like a pot of porridge, would vanish.
Alcohol would sweep away those regrets and sorrows;
when I could not do what I wanted to,
when I found worldly matters hard going,
I lived through it all with alcohol as my companion.
I drank so much that my nose turned red –
a symptom of alcoholism.
When people met in those days,
it was common to go to a bar and have a drink.
After a few, the alcohol in me kept drinking.
Passing out is the drunkest you can get,
but perhaps because I always ate so much,
I did not get to that state often.
Many nights were spent pouring and drinking
until the early hours of the morning,
and it was bothersome to have to go to the bathroom often.
Although alcohol can be necessary in human affairs,
for many, it became a poison that killed them.
I had a high tolerance for alcohol,
so much so that I used to think, in the world
there was no one who had drunk more than I.
I had a strong head for alcohol and could hold my drink.
I think it is curious that I am still alive
after all that I have drunk.
I have not had a drink for more than a decade,
but when I first started teaching Truth, I drank a lot.
After I was enlightened,
I could not get drunk no matter how much I drank.
Alcohol had been my companion,
it had consoled my loneliness,
banished my agonies, and eased my sorrows.
Perhaps it assuaged the feelings of inferiority
that existed because of my mind.
Alcohol took some friends to the next world,
and my drinking buddies started to disappear.
I am by nature hard-working so even when teaching Truth,
I taught whole-heartedly and diligently.
Once in a while, I think about having a drink,
but rather than the alcohol itself
I think it is the atmosphere I miss –
the atmosphere where one could talk without barriers.
Sometimes I swept out all the events in my mind with alcohol,
and at times I drank and drank without rhyme or reason;
perhaps I drank because of the unsolved riddles in my mind;
why people are born into the world,
and why they die.
Even as I drank, I worked hard,
so I earned a lot of money and lived well.
Now all the questions in my mind have been answered,
and my sighs, my curiosity, even alcohol, have all vanished.
I have no sorrow or loneliness,
nothing to achieve, no friends, no alcohol,
and alone, I write and write.
I write and write calligraphy and prose,
and in order to teach people Truth in the easiest possible way,
I live writing, then writing some more.
I teach the world’s most difficult subject –
the method to become complete,
and to save the world.
But people do not have much perseverance;
having lived for their selves only,
their consciousnesses are dead
and they live in a non-existent world.
I try to teach people at a level
appropriate to their endurance,
but I find that they sorely lack dedication
in this most important of matters: of life and death.
I put in a hundred times more effort in teaching
than people do in learning –
I dedicate all of my time.
– Woo Myung
🌠 Reflect at Santa Clara Meditation
At Santa Clara Meditation, this story becomes a lesson about true transformation.
🌿 Through meditation, you can:
- Go beyond temporary escapes like alcohol
- Resolve deep questions about life and death
- Eliminate suffering, loneliness, and inner conflict
- Live with clarity, purpose, and Truth
✨ True peace comes not from escape, but from awakening.
