Going back home!

What do we want from life, judging not by our words but by our actions?

Very simple, basic things, common to all.  

We want to love and to be loved.

We want happiness and fulfillment, though we may have differing ideas of what that means.

We want a place in life, a way of belonging, a sense of purpose, the achievement of worthy goals – whatever it takes; otherwise life is an empty show.

And, of course, we want never to die.

These yearnings are not wrong, then.  What happens is that we interpret them wrongly.

They are messages from the spirit which have somehow got scrambled by the world of matter, and we lack the decoder by which to understand. That scrambling is what Hindu mysticism means by the much-misunderstood word maya: the wishful, willful illusion that the thirst in our hearts is physical and can somehow be slaked by physical experience.

We wander searching for the right things in the wrong places, seeking Eden in the world of the senses, and life itself seems to delight in frustrating us.

“The soul is a pilgrim,” said John Ruysbroeck, one of the great Rhineland mystics who succeeded Eckhart, “for it sees its country.”

But until we glimpse our “soul’s true home,” we are not so much pilgrims as tourists. Being a traveler is one thing, but no one really likes to be a tourist. Nothing is ever quite right: the food, the beds, the chairs, the customs. We shake our heads and mutter under our breath the universal tourist’s complaint: “Back home…”

In everyone there is this inward tug, this call to return. But because we are turned outward, our hearing gets confused. The call seems to be coming from outside. What we seek is always just around the corner…and when we reach the corner, it has ducked out of sight down the block. Yet human nature is so strong that even after turning corners a thousand times, we still say, “The thousand and first – that’s going to be the one!” Life becomes a pilgrimage around corners.

But there comes a time when corners no longer beckon. We know from bitter experience that they only hide blind alleys. This juncture is critical; for once one reaches it, nothing on earth can satisfy for long. Those with drive may plunge into restless activity. The more frustrated they feel, the more things they try – globe-trotting, solo climbing, cars, clothes, casinos, commodities futures. But the desire to wrest meaning from life only grows more urgent as frustration mounts.

  Later, looking back, this utter restlessness may prove to be the first touch of what traditional religion calls grace. It means that a person has grown too big to be satisfied with petty satisfactions that come and go. But the crisis is real. If we do not understand the message, frustration can turn desperate of self-destructive – not only for an individual, but for a whole society. Each age has its own kind of suffering, the natural consequences of mistaken values it pursues, and the suffering of our industrial age is loneliness, alienation, and despair. Alienation can cause terrible harm; for it is when we feel isolated and alone that we lose sensitivity to others, and obsession with private desires and fears fills up our world. Walk the streets of any inner city today and you will see the fruits of separateness all around you, the anguish of a society in which even children and the aged are cut adrift and left on their own.

There comes a time in the growth of civilizations, as with individuals, when the life-and-death questions of material existence have been answered, yet the soul still thirsts and physical challenges cease to satisfy. Then we stand at a crossroads: for without meaningful aspiration, the human being turns destructive. Spiritual fulfillment is an evolutionary imperative. Like a snake that must shed its skin to grow, our industrial civilization must shed its material outlook or strangle in outgrown ideals whose constructive potential has been spent.

In the end, then, life itself turns us inward – “away from created things,” as Eckhart says, to “find our unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul.”

The end of the Fall is the Return. Alienation is the heartache of feeling out of place in a senseless universe. Its purpose is to turn us homeward, and all experience ultimately conspires to that end.” Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not,” Eckhart assures us, “secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.”

  This is a most compassionate view of human nature.

Even when we are busy accumulating possessions with which to feather our little nest, planning a hilltop castle with garage space for half a dozen new cars, Eckhart would say we are really looking for God. We think, “If I can fix up my place just right, with a little bar and sauna in my room and my own entertainment center at my fingertips, then I’ll feel at home!”

But we will never be at home except in Eden.

-Eknath Easwaran.