You Are What You Seek

The light is not at the end of the tunnel.

Even the spiritual practices we use to centre ourselves and return to the present moment can become just further items on an ever-expanding list of things to do before we can simply relax, drop in to our deep selves, and enjoy being held in the embrace of the universe (or what you will).

Why do we think the peace and the light are over there, at the end of the tunnel, and not here where we are right now?

Why do we find it so difficult to feel what so many of the wise have said to be true, that love is the baseline of existence? Why is it so hard just to be still, here, now, with that baseline?

I don’t have the full answer to those questions, but here’s a small piece of the puzzle as I see it.

If you’ve grown up in or anywhere near the West there’s a good chance that you’ve absorbed the message from the Old Testament that we Children of Eve are essentially flawed in our being (original sin) and our earthly existence is accursed (punishment and exile from the garden).

It’s a depressing message, not one to inspire a lot of self-love nor love of the creation. And yet it’s one that has been disseminated, often forcefully, for thousands of years.

I know what it’s like to carry that cultural story. Painful. (Much more painful than a stone in your shoe. More like a perpetual medieval stoning.) And painfully I see it being played out through our world—

These things are clearly interwoven.

If at some deep level we have accepted the judgement that we and our world are basically bad, then how can we hope to relax and feel at peace in ourselves, with each other, and in our lives? And how can we hope to be still and feel love as the baseline of existence?

It’s an impossible conflict.

And so we are left with running, running, striving for heaven up above or at the end of a long list of achievements, self-improvements or technological advances, basically at war with ourselves and exiled from the here and now.

But it doesn’t have to be so.

You can step out of the story of being fundamentally flawed and exiled in a hostile world. Seek out its threads in you and pull them out. See it for what it is and choose something different.

We can choose to make friends with ourselves as we are and our world as it is, however ugly or messy all that appears to be.

We can slow down and soften into what is here, and open to being gently held wherever we are by the encompassing mystery.

Imagine sitting down to prayer or meditation with the sense of relaxing into a beautiful warm embrace, feeling loved and accepted exactly as you are by the power that holds the universe in being from moment to moment.

Spiritual practice can be like that. Essentially, that’s all it is. A natural thing, a simple thing. Resting naturally in love, in peace.

It sounds easy, because it is.

There is nothing inside us to escape from, nor anything outside us to overcome.

We are already awakened beings. We are fundamentally good. We belong here amidst the goodness and generosity of the earth and sky. We are at home in the miracle of the universe’s unfolding.

By choosing again and again to inhabit this more cheerful (and I believe more true) story about ourselves and our cosmos, we give our spirituality the chance to become a celebration of and deepening into what already is, here and now, rather than a quest or battle to become something other than we are.

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