Returning to the Starting Point
The goal is the place where one began. As a baby, one was blissfully conscious of the present moment, untouched by accumulated knowledge, memory, or conditioning. Since then, learning has gradually taken us away from the true self.
In the process of growing up, one keeps acquiring knowledge, skills, abilities, and appearances to create a unique persona that is acceptable to society. This movement away from reality creates a complex personality that expects different things from different people and situations. Many times, these expectations conflict with one another, producing constant stress and misery.
The Search Outside
The need to be happy and fulfilled remains, but it becomes externalized. Happiness is sought in the objects of the world and in relationships with others. Yet neither objects nor relationships are entirely within one’s control. The desire to control the external world to satisfy internal needs leads to disappointment and disillusionment with both the world and oneself.
Only when one reaches the dead wall of life through such efforts does a sudden understanding arise absolute happiness and fulfillment cannot be found this way. At that point, attention begins to turn inward, often with the help of masters and the knowledge they have shared about true happiness.
The Inward and Backward Journey
Still, it is difficult to understand that this journey is both inward and backward. Throughout life, one has looked outward and forward to fulfill ambitions and desires. Because of this habit, the spiritual path is often imagined in the same way:
- as something far away that must be reached;
- as an experience that must be obtained;
- as a state that must be gained.
But if the place one must reach is the place where one began, the path is not a pursuit of something new. It is a retracing of the way back.
Unburdening the Acquired Self
Retracement requires detachment from all that has been acquired. It is the unloading of one’s baggage and the gradual stepping back from the accumulated personas. This letting go happens one by one, one step at a time.
The very act of unburdening brings relief. With less entanglement in the world, there are fewer conflicts and less suffering. As the burden falls away, space opens for the pure experience of joy, which is one’s inherent nature. It is important to recognize and experience this change as it unfolds.
The Taste of the Real
When this space fully expands, the limited dissolves and only the limitless remains: the one without a second. Once one is established in this reality, returning to the world of objects and relationships is no longer a problem, because they are seen as impermanent and therefore unreal.
The taste of the real is required to realize this.
12 Jul,2026
