How to reach literary Nirvana

BarcelonaDialogue is a humanities and spirituality magazine that, as its editors describe, "highlights the diversity of religious beliefs and the roots of all of them in this corner of the world that is Catalonia." My favorite section is the Spiritual guide of Catalonia, signed by the writer, journalist, translator and editor Anna Punsoda (and also director of the magazine for a year): a series of chronicles written after spending a couple of days in oratories, monasteries or retreat houses, which will end up being a book by Fragmenta and which will delight everyone who has read her magnificent guide to the Segarra, The hard earth, published in Pòrtic in 2024. So far, two have been published: that of the Montserrat monastery (warning that if you read it you will end with a crush with its abbess) and that of Casa Virupa, the Mediterranean Buddhist center in Llinars del Vallès. Here, Punsoda learns the Four Noble Truths enunciated by Buddha: that living involves dissatisfaction (illness, aging, loss, death); that the cause of this is desire or attachment (to pleasure, ideas, ego); that by ridding ourselves of attachment we can extinguish dissatisfaction; and that the Eightfold Path is the way to achieve it (understanding, intention, word, action, way of life, effort, mindfulness, and concentration).

This article made me think of an article by researcher Martin A. Schwartz, from the Yale School of Medicine, where he warns that, in science, the ego of researchers and the desire for hypotheses to be correct contaminates the experiment and they can end up forcing them or tweaking the results for publication. To counteract this and facilitate clear thinking, he proposes the path of "passionate disinterest" or non-attachment—that is, admitting one's own ambitions and then removing them from what we do. I've been reminded of this quite a bit lately, because I've read novels where the authors' infatuation with their characters, the need to parade their egos, or the self-consciousness that comes with displaying on social media have pushed me out of the plot, and in some cases, I've stopped skimming or skimming altogether.

Like Schwartz or Casa Virupa, I propose detachment as the path that will lead Catalan and international writers to literary nirvana because, even in autofiction, the author should be the least of the equation. In the Eightfold Path, we will find a compass:

• Vision: what does the text need?

• Intention: to share, not to display.

• Word: less is more.

• Action: manuscript before selfie.

• Life: read, write, be silent.

• Effort: revise, don’t flog yourself.

• Attention: airplane mode.

• Concentration: publish and let go.

If we manage to put aside our ego and put the text and the story at the center, we will be able to open ourselves to a reality greater than ourselves, we will write better and we will contribute to the world with works that endure. Namaste.