"Having never left the house you are asking for the way home" - Nisargadatta Maharaj
Through my teens, twenties, and thirties, I had no interest in religion or spirituality. That isn’t to say I wasn’t seeking for something greater in my life experience. Like the prodigal in the story Jesus told, I languished with feelings of discontent, the sense of something missing, lacking, and incomplete. Having little exposure to spiritual perspectives my search was entirely outer-focused. The only apparent solution to this dissatisfaction was to be found in objective experience, and so the journey was strictly focused on objects, substances, states, and relationships. When one sees oneself merely as a separate being in a world there really isn’t another recognizable way forward. The external orientation to peace and happiness follows the logic that improving the outer landscape will improve the inner experience. Alas, it didn’t work. Still doesn’t. Perhaps you can relate.
Several decades ago, at my partner's urging, I found myself in a Unity church and heard the message of the Prodigal Son from a very dynamic minister. I swear he was looking at me and talking just to me. Familiar? At that point, I was as desperate as the character in the parable and equally primed to respond to the message of hopelessness in pursuit of happiness through materiality. I had assiduously followed the path of achievement and success, and despite having a respectable level of prosperity, a beautiful wife, and child, there was a deep hole inside. I didn’t have words for it at the time, but I was certain that the ways and means I had been pursuing were misguided. If I wanted more out of life than occasional hits of happiness laced sparingly through lingering feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction I would have to turn around.
Although I would still say to this day that that insight to reverse my pursuit of happiness saved my life, it has been a daunting undertaking that I have only recently been able to fully understand and realize. Even though my heart broke open in that church service and I was shaken to the core accompanied by a visceral expansion through a flood of tears, it was only the beginning of a journey toward a fully realized understanding and recognition of truth. That journey continues today, however, I now see how my efforts to grow spiritually were hampered by a faulty belief. Perhaps you will have followed a similar misperception and will profit from an explanation of my experience.
Here it is in a nutshell: The separate self will never wake up! It can’t. Not that it doesn’t want to, mind you. It’s all about trying to find peace and freedom and happiness. The problem and thus the futility of its search is that it also wants to survive and it doesn’t realize that its very existence is the barrier to spiritual realization. The moth longs for the flame above all else but it is the only thing the moth cannot experience. To experience the flame means to be consumed in it, to die into it. That is the experience for which the moth longs. As St. Francis noted, “it is in dying to self, that one is born to eternal life.” The caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly. It actually dissolves so that the transformation can take place.
These many years of spiritual study, practice, countless workshops, teachings, teachers, affirmations, prayers, and meditations were deeply flawed by my belief that somehow this mind/body character that I have taken myself to be would finally “get it” and wake up. While the effort was sincere, the assumption was delusional. Even though I professed nondual language over and over, affirming that I am a divine being, a child of God, spiritual to the core, I was still clinging to this notion of a personal self (separate from others and the world) who would become spiritualized and enlightened. I have come to realize that it’s not possible. And this has come about honestly. That is, I now see that the self I have taken myself to be over my lifetime, has no basis in reality.
Since I have begun pursuing the pure teachings of nonduality teachings of Advaita Vedanta I have come to see that the barrier to realization is not inadequate spiritual study but mistaken identity.
I have come to see we must carve out time to explore the inner realm of our being with as much urgency as we pour into solving the outer challenges in life. This is the reason for a spiritual practice that inquires into the nature of our minds and the limited self we have assumed ourselves to be. To make room for Grace - the sweet embrace of loving presence that fills us with a knowing that no matter what comes or goes in the outer, we are safe and secure in its unconditional embrace.
I will have more specific details on my journey of realizing my true self in upcoming articles. For now, I leave you with this sweet and moving poem from Danna Faulds.
Delve deeper. You are divinity; the vast and open sky of spirit.
It's the light of God, the ember at your core, the passion and the presence,
the timeless, deathless essence of you that reaches out and touches me.
Who you are transcends fear and turns suffering into liberation.
Who you are is love. – from Who You Are by Danna Faulds
Peace and blessings, Rev. Larry
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