ALEX EXARCHOS
Walk with me...
... the unfiltered One and Only Truth
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For a long stretch of my life, I was two people at once.
One of them did everything right - at least so far as our modern society is concerned. Born in Athens, raised middle-class, pushed — gently, lovingly — towards all things safe and respectable. A straight-A student. An honours degree in business, then a master's in human resources. Into the corporate race without a pause, and up its (thorny-rugged) ladder faster than most. By my early thirties I had the seat that is supposed to settle the question of a life: a secure position inside a large, internationally respected financial institution, a six-figure salary, the whole architecture of I, truly and definitely, made it.
In the dungeon-like corridors of the esteemed financial institution, where I landed a "cushy" job
The other person never fell for this whole "shenanigan-rich charade" (to quote him).
That one had known, for as long as I could remember being in the shoes of "Alex," that things are not as they are presented. That the neat surface of an ordinary life sits on top of something far stranger, more interconnected, and more alive than anyone around me seemed open, willing - or even aware - enough to say out loud.
And I - this is what is most important - could not entirely and convincingly stand behind any of these two "guys". Why? Simply because I did not want to.
So I did the (supposedly) reasonable, Solomonic thing. I split the difference. Model employee by day. While by night and on weekends, I was all but invested in the other search, the real one. Dr Jekyll at the corporate cubicle, Mr Hyde at the writer's desk at home. It worked the way holding your breath works (so, you can imagine). For a while.
Then it stopped working.
"Desperate" Alex, somehow managing to look funny, even at his darkest hour
The honest version is that I came close to the edge. Not the fast and dramatic kind you usually read about. No. It was rather the slow and irrevocably corroding kind. This eventually took the form of a "silent" burnout - one that had nowhere to discharge, because both halves of my life were running at full output and neither one was the decisively true one. My body took all the punishing burden before I would admit any of it - even to myself, for crying out loud: my sleep was seriously hampered first. Then my weight went the wrong way.
Eventually, my days were narrowly reduced to the single task of getting through them. By the end I was, for most of my waking hours, subject to some combination of flattening anxiety and quiet desperation. The man in that previous photo is me, at roughly the worst of this very stretch, somehow still managing to look faintly amused. (The amusement, for the record, was 100% real. As was the rest.)
What turned this was not a breakthrough. It was mostly a handful of people. Some I met in person, some only through their work. All of them were clearly further into the same country than I was, and all of them, for reasons I still do not fully understand, were willing to reach back. None of them handed me a method. That exact fact, though I could not have said so at the time, was the whole of the point. They met me first as a person, and only second, if at all, as a problem to be solved, and something in that ordering did more than any technique could have ever done to me. I have tried, ever since, to meet the people who come to me the same way round - putting warmth before instruction, and always, instinctively, failing honestly towards it on the occasions I fall short. Nothing in my external circumstances changed at that time. What changed was where I was standing when I looked - in any direction (including inside of me).
Because here is the thing this whole crisis had been hiding from me. The problem was never the job, or the schedule, or the two-sides arithmetic I kept trying to solve. The problem was the arithmetic itself. The belief that there were two sides, and that one of them had to win. The freedom I had been chasing somewhere out ahead of me had been, the entire time, exactly where I was standing. (Which is not the same as saying it was easy to see. It almost never is.)
When that landed, and it landed slowly, over months, not in a single flash, the rest followed. My health came back, both on the outside and on the inside. The relationships around me became more effortless and warmer. The work I had been doing in the margins moved quietly to the centre. And the writing, which had always been there, simply opened. By the early 2020s I had written and published seven books, the most recent being 102 Companions On Your Journey To The One And Only Truth.
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where these stories tend to turn into the worst kind of fiction.
They tell you the rupture was worth it. That the protagonist of the story "arrived". That you can do so too. I am not going to tell you that, because it would simply not be true. Not as far as I'm concerned, and, I suspect, not as far as anyone selling you such mythical "arrival" is.
Shortly after that, in the second half of 2024 I suffered from a series of strokes. They severely affected my health, my work - my whole life really - more than any other event before.
I am still recovering (with emphasis, here, on the present tense). My speech is slower now. The dysarthria catches on certain words, often the third one in a line, which tends to be the very one I most want to land. My singing voice - which I enjoyed so much and which I was so proud of - has not fully come back. I walk every day as part of the recovery - real walking, on real ground - and somewhere along the way the walking stopped being only recovery and became, again, the actual (literal and metaphorical) thing itself.
I do not mention any of this as evidence of comeback. I offer it as evidence of the one structural thing I keep relearning, which is that the evolution of a human being is never a straight line. For every two steps forward there is, at the very least, one step back. That is not a flaw in the process. It is the actual process. Anyone walking this road should expect it, and should not become undone by it when it arrives (and it definitely will, time and again).
There is one more thing here I had to come to terms with after (and as a result of) what happened to me: The way I write — the sentence that stops to revise itself in front of you, the thought that arrives and then corrects itself a few words in — is not a style I chose. It is the shape of how I now speak. The voice on the page and the voice in the room run at the same slowed, self-correcting pace. The dysarthria is in the prose. At some point I stopped trying to edit it out of either one.
So let me spell out, in the plainest way possible, who is now speaking to you.
I am not a guru. I have not "awakened," not in the way this - heavily misused and abused - word typically gets sold, and I will not insult your intelligence by pretending that I have. I am a fellow walker. I am Prodromos, a forerunner, which in plain Greek means the one who goes a little way ahead on the same road. Not because he has reached the end of it, but so that the others behind him can see, and feel, that the road is walkable at all. The inquiry I have been living inside for some twenty-five years (and the ensuing transmission) is not finished - can never be finished, in all honesty. The seven books I have written and offer are not a summit. They mark the trail so far - and, again, this, by nature, marks a never-ending path.
That position is not a marketing angle. As best as I can tell, it is the only honest one available. Because the thing we are all actually looking for cannot be reached from inside the search that goes looking for it. The one who claims to have crossed over is selling you a place that does not exist. I would rather lose you here, on this page, than walk you one step towards something that was never there, to begin (or to end) with.
So before we go any further, the simplest, truest thing I have is also the one I freely give away. Read this first, and then decide if you wish to explore my work any further.
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Now, let me also give you a few ordinary facts about me:
I live in Frankfurt am Main with my partner, Hanna, who is wonderful beyond what the word manages to carry, and I get back to Athens as often as I can. My parents are retired and, remarkably, still happily married. My father was a doctor, my mother was an English teacher. My younger brother is an engineer, recently married, and has already made me an uncle twice. The business and human-resources degrees that once looked unremarkable to me turned out to matter at the exact moments I needed them the most.
What holds my attention, beyond my inquiry into the true nature of the world itself: Writing. The arts, and especially literature, film, music, theatre. Travelling. And, to my own (at least, initial) surprise, the craft of marketing, copywriting and advertising, which I came to see as a genuine instrument. Useful for carrying worthy things to the people they are meant for, and, not incidentally, for almost any honest attempt to say what you actually mean.
The books that shaped me most are: Anthony de Mello's Awareness. Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Joel Goldsmith's The Art of Meditation. Srikumar Rao's Are You Ready to Succeed?. Claude Hopkins's Scientific Advertising. And if I had to name what I am for, in the plainest words I have, they would be five: creativity, freedom, productivity, spirituality, fun.
None of that entirely covers the point of who I truly am, of course. It is the furniture. Necessary and not insignificant details - yet, touching the essence fleetingly and partially, only.
And then there is my work, which is really but one piece wearing different clothes.
You see, every page on this site, every book, every single offering, points at the same recognition: That what you are looking for is what is doing the actual looking. They differ only in how far in you already are, as well as in how close you want to walk.
If you want the fuller statement of where I actually stand, the position laid out as bluntly and unprocessed as possible, without any costume around it, it is here. Read that and you will know within a few minutes whether we are indeed on the same road, or not.
From there the road forks by appetite, not by rank. There is the long-form transmission, on video, for walking through it slowly and at your own pace, which is The Unfiltered. There is the book made to keep you company on the walk, a hundred and two passages to sit with and return to, which is 102 Companions. There is the live inquiry, six months of it, done alongside a small group of others standing roughly where you also find yourself to stand, which is The Spiral. And, for the very few who feel ready to go through this one to one, by giving permission to themselves to stare right at their closest and least forgiving kind of reflection, there is The Mirror.
You do not need all of these. In fact, you may not need any. Reading this page alone is a perfectly good outcome (both for you and for me), and I mean that without any false modesty. It is no secret that I make my living from this website, and I would be glad if something here proved worth your hard-earned money. But I know you are not a unit of sale. You are a whole person, the same as I am, and having you here at all is the better part of our joint experience - we already have this, can you see it?
Once again, if the Manifesto is where you would rather begin (and, frankly, without knowing you I'd say that I consider you starting there as a safe bet), it is right here, and it costs you nothing more than an email address:
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I will leave you with a line from my first book, MONO, because after all these years it condenses my transmission the way few (if any, at all) other things have managed to:
There is no shortcut from dreams to reality. There are endless shortcuts from reality to dreams.
The road continues. I am a little way up it. Not far, never far. And the next step - as it always was, is, and will be - is yours and only yours to take.
Walk with me.
— Alex
