When I was deeply lost in non-duality, a particular spiritual philosophy, I tried to force myself into understanding our true nature.

I wanted to study the person into enlightenment.

And this confused the shit out of me.

“You don’t exist”, I read, and I tried very hard to not exist.

“This is all an illusion” I heard, and so I did my very best to pretend that nothing was there.

“You already are what you’re looking for” was also popular, but that didn’t really seem to be a helpful pointer because I felt like shit most of the time.

And “Everything is One” sounded really cool and wise, but all I experienced was separation.

This is the hellish predicament of the searching human being.

We try to understand something that is beyond our capacity to understand.

We use the instrument that is praised to death in our education system, to grasp the totality of life.

But that won’t work.

Ever.

Spirituality and its relatives Self-realization and Enlightenment, do not really exist.

They are not things but merely serve as fairly broad and clumsy ways to express something as good as possible.

But the mind, or the intellect, will never get it.

The mind is just a tiny, tiny part of this magnificent whole, so by nature, it will never be capable of grasping that whole, of conquering it, of making it 100% clear.

That’s why the mind has to break somewhere during the process, it has to surrender, get lost in the background, or be washed away by something that is more profound and non-changing.

Still, it’s totally okay to read about it, like I did, because it will maximize the hunger, enlarge the longing, and spark the desire, to keep looking for something that just HAS to be there.

And the reason you know that, the reason you are even looking for it in the first place, is because it is already there.

Yeah, I get it, that is one of the shitty ones.

But it’s true.

Consciousness is looking for itself.

Like a flashlight shining in the dark, trying to find its own source.

Even the smartest metaphors or statements, though, are just that: statements and metaphors.

They can sound truly exciting and excitingly true, and they can sound fucking frustrating, depending on where the understanding is at.

It’s just how it is.

Nowadays, whenever I pick up a spiritual book, it all makes sense to me.

I found most of it pretty boring, to be honest, but I get it.

Which is pretty cool.

This journey can be totally agonizing and utterly hopeless, but the mind will have to be exhausted, somehow.

The good news is that it doesn’t really matter if you read spiritual books or not.

The shift that makes all this esoteric stuff finally feel like home will happen when it happens, and I have noticed that people who feel deeply inclined to look for it, are driven by consciousness itself.

This means it’s a done deal.

The recognition WILL come.

And that is probably just another one of those knockdown arguments.

Sorry for that.

But it’s a done deal nonetheless.

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(Photo by @wflwong, for Unsplash)