It is not about becoming.
You are already home.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion.
That comes with sincere seeking.
Maybe you recognize it.
The sense that you are constructing something.
Assembling the conditions.
Doing the work.
And in your way towards peace.
That keeps moving.
Just slightly ahead of you.
As if a rival is always the winner.
One more practice away.
One more understanding away.
One more healed layer away.
And underneath all of that so quietly you may not have named it.
They believe that right now.
.
.
As you are.
You are not quite enough.
God bless.
Is somewhere ahead of you.
That the divine is something you are reaching towards.
That if you just complete enough inner work.
Attend enough retreats.
Understand enough teachings.
You will finally.
.
.
I am familiar with this place.
I have been in it for this year.
And what I want to explore with you today.
The possibility.
That this emptiness It's not a sign you need to try harder.
It may be.
Is signed.
Than they direct to itself.
Is worth questioning.
Ramana Maharshi.
One of the most widely revolutionary teachers of the 20th century.
Say something.
Power Forge.
That resonated deeply when I first heard it.
He's fake.
There is no reaching the self.
If the seth When do we reach?
It would mean the self is not here now.
I'm back.
It's not possible.
Let me say that again.
It's lonely.
There is no reaching the Self.
If the self want to be reached.
It would mean the self is not here now.
And dad.
Is not possible.
The self cannot be reached because it is what is doing the reaching.
Their wellness,
Looking for peace.
Ease itself.
The peace it is looking for.
The consciousness seeking the divine is the divine seeking.
Shankaracharya and they will get you the money.
Written over a thousand years ago.
Put the seat this way.
You are not alone.
You are not on the way to becoming whole.
You are Brahman.
The absolute.
The ground of all existence.
Appearing temporarily.
As a person who has forgotten this.
And David Hawking.
In the eye of the eye.
Translates this into language I find deeply encouraging.
Keep safe.
The spiritual path.
Is not a journey towards something.
It is a progressive removal.
Of what obscures what is already fully present.
Think about that distinction for a moment.
Imagine a mirror.
Covered in dust.
The mirror is not broken.
It is not incomplete.
It is not becoming a mirror.
It already is one.
Fully and perfectly.
Underneath the dust.
The work is not to construct a mirror.
The work is simply to notice the dust.
And gently,
Without drama,
Let it settle.
The dust.
Is there key related beliefs about who you are?
The stories the mind tells about what you lack.
What you max fix.
What you must become before you are allowed to receive.
And what I find so tender about this.
.
.
Is bad.
Every course you took.
Every practice you committed to.
Every teacher you sat with.
Every dark night you move too.
None of it What's wasted?
Not because it built something in June.
Because.
It worth something away.
Each genuine encounter with truth.
Removed a little more of the dust.
Each moment of real stillness.
Showed you briefly.
What was always underneath.
The journey was never the construction of a self worthy of arriving.
It was.
That is slow.
Sometimes beautiful,
Sometimes exhausting.
Always necessary remembering.
Of what was never absent.
Now.
Now.
Here is where I want to pause and go one layer down.
Because.
.
.
There are actually two things being said here.
And they are related.
But they are not the same.
The first is about how to travel.
The seeker's relationship to the past.
The relief of recognizing rather than becoming.
This second is about where you already stand.
The nature of home itself.
The understanding.
That the distance was never real.
That you will never actually awake.
1.
Addresses the exhaustion of the journey.
The other.
Addresses something more fundamental.
The impossibility of ever having been lost.
David Hawkins.
With us again and again.
To a story from the Christian tradition.
That he hates not us theology.
But as a precise map.
Of how consciousness moves.
The story of the prodigal son.
A sun-lissed home.
He travels far.
He suffers.
He accumulates experience.
So love it,
Beautiful.
Much of it difficult.
And one day.
.
.
Having exhausted every other option.
He simply returns and walks back.
He does not construct the home before he arrives.
He does not earn the right to enter it.
He does not become worthy of the welcome.
She simply.
.
.
Turns and walks.
And the father.
Seeing him from a distance.
Runs to meet him.
Before he even had a chance.
Good fiends.
Was not everyone.
For sufficient self-improvement.
It was the natural response.
Of love.
To the return of what he loves.
Loan shipper.
The 14th century Tibetan master.
Whose teaching on what he called the basic space of phenomena.
Is among the most precise investigations of the nature of mind.
That any tradition has offered.
Points towards something I find both challenging and deeply helpful.
He's teaching.
Resonates with this understanding.
Than what we call obscuration.
They forget.
Deconfliction.
The sense of being lost.
Arises within a wellness itself.
Not as something foreign to it.
Not as damage that needs rebating.
By the movement within.
What was never actually disturbed.
The way.
A wave moves within the ocean.
Without the ocean.
Ever ceasing to be the ocean.
You are the ocean.
You have always been the ocean.
The wave of forgetting.
Did not change what you are.
Eat only.
Temporally.
Changed what you know today.
Mason Eckhart.
The 13th century Christian mystic.
Spoke of what he called the ground of the soul.
As identical with the ground.
Not similar to it.
Not reaching toward it.
Identical with each other.
He said,
The source movement is not from here to there.
It is from the surface.
To the death.
From the noise of becoming.
To the silence of being.
And that silence.
Is not empty.
It is the fullness from which Everything arises.
The Gospel of Thomas among the earliest collections of contemplative teachings attributed to Jesus.
Contains a saying that has stayed with me.
The kingdom is spread upon the earth.
And people do not see.
Not coming.
Not being concerned.
Not reserved for the sufficiently evolved.
Already.
Here is something simple that may make all of this land in a different way.
Imagine you have been searching for your key.
Checking every cell.
Every pocket.
Every home.
Growing increasingly frustrated.
And then.
.
.
You noticed.
The keys are in your hands.
They were there the entire time.
Not lost?
Not something you needed to earn back.
Simply Annotated.
This search was not wrong.
It leads you eventually to the recognition.
By the keys.
Will never upset you.
Soul.
The invitation today.
Calls to movement.
And they complete each other.
The first.
You do not need to become more spiritual.
More seared Modified.
The path is not construction.
It is recognition.
The second.
You will never away from home.
Not fully.
Not even once.
The density of this dimension.
Creates the sensation of distance.
The mind generates the story of Noche.
Not enough.
Not dead.
Underneath this story.
Underneath the seeking.
Underneath every course.
And every practice.
And every sincere reaching.
There is something that has never moved.
Something.
That was present.
Before the first start this morning.
Something.
That will be present.
After the last thought tonight.
Something that does not need to be built.
To be healed into existence.
Or to be achieved.
Only recommend.
They'll punish us.
Call it Atma.
Hawkins call it the present.
Ramana Maharishi simply pointed at it and said,
That which is aware right now.
That is what you are.
Not what you are becoming.
What you are.
So the next time the mind says,
I still have so much work to do,
Maybe let us thought be there.
And then.
.
.
Underneath it.
Notice what is noticing the thought.
Than noticing.
That quiet.
Our presence.
That is not on the way to enlightenment.
That is it.
All ready.
Completely.
See ya.
You are not becoming.
You are recognizing.
You are not building your way home.
You are all ready.
Standing in it.
And there is a world of difference between those two worlds.
They pleased you.
The other.
Finally!
Less stress.
Welcome home.
