The Search for Reality

The human being is a complicated creature.

We consist of two major parts: the totally spiritual and the totally material. By the material part, I mean the physical body (the temporary manifestation into which you have incarnated in this particular lifetime), your emotional nature, your thinking nature and the life-energy inside you. The other part of you, the spiritual part, does not incarnate and is always the same. You may call it the Soul, the Spirit, or the Divinity within you.

In this extremely materialistic society in which we are living, there is too much emphasis on physical things, on physical comforts and enjoyment, on mental creativity and thinking for its own sake. With all that busyness of society, the spiritual part of us—that which has existed since the beginning of time and which will exist until the end of time and beyond—is completely forgotten. Of all the people in the world, how many are desperately seeking the spiritual part of themselves? Thousands maybe, but what is that compared to the seven billion on this planet?

To use an analogy: imagine you have fifteen million euros in a Swiss bank account. Your parents gave it to you but somehow you know nothing about it, and meanwhile you continue to live as a homeless person, sleeping at the railway station and thinking you are miserable and unhappy. Similarly, we each have this incredible Spiritual Reality within us—we are omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, full of absolute Bliss, Love, Joy, Ecstasy and vibrant living—and we know nothing about it! Furthermore, we are not even interested in seeking it, because we are so entrapped in material pursuits or personality satisfaction—the satisfaction of the physical body, the mind and the emotions.

Within us is another dimension, another vast, bright, imperishable Reality, full of Ecstasy, Joy, Potential and Creativity beyond imagination, and we don’t even want to know about it! This is the disaster of modern society. And because we have forgotten the essential Self, the real Being within ourselves, we have wars and stress in society; we have family problems, work problems, political and religious problems. We are not connected to our Spiritual Source; we are completely out of tune with Reality and will continue to have problems until the end of time unless we realize that our society is completely off the rails. We are looking for solutions at the level of the personality—psychological, sociological, philosophical and political explanations—but they never have solved the problem and never will. They cannot solve the problem because they only revolve around this limited expression of reality.

What we see in this world is only a fragment of Creation.

The vast physical Universe is literally just the surface or skin of the multidimensional, infinite Space. People do not seem bothered to seek this multidimensional, almighty part of Nature and that great, almighty part of themselves.

However, those people who have started on the Spiritual Path have seen beyond that limited view of reality and believe there is something inside them that is greater, something well worth seeking. You may call it Self-Realization, the Realization of Truth, the Realization of God, the Realization of Nirvāṇa, of the Buddha-Mind or the Kingdom of Heaven. That belief is an indication that people are searching within for the greater part of themselves and the greater part of the Cosmos—that which they cannot see.

There are more than a billion Christians and more than a billion Muslims, and many millions of Jews, Buddhists and other religious people in the world, but I am not referring here to religious people. You can be religious through habit. You may have been brought up as a Roman Catholic, so you go to church, or if you were brought up as a Jew you go to the synagogue, but that doesn’t mean you are seeking the Eternal at all. In Buddhist countries you see boys as young as four years of age put into monasteries and they live all their lives as monks, but they are only monks because they were put there. If they had been born in Western Europe and given a computer job, that is what they would be doing. Just because they put on a monk’s robe through social habit or culture doesn’t mean they are real monks, that they are truly seeking Reality. You have to distinguish between what is simply habit and something that is desperate inside you, desperate to want to know and experience the truth in this lifetime. Whether religious or not, until a person has reached that desperate stage, he or she cannot progress far.

If you are at the beginning stage, you might think that you meditate or chant because it relaxes you, or because it harmonizes your mind and makes you feel happy and alive. Well, that is fine; it does do those things. But if you still have such ideas—that meditation or chanting is only useful for dealing with the stresses of life—then you are still scratching the surface. You have not really understood the process. It is only when you desperately want that invisible Otherness inside you that the need to meditate or chant will make sense to you.

You need to live a spiritual life to attain the Spiritual Dimension.

You have to structure your whole life in a spiritual way, according to a plan, otherwise you simply won’t get there. If you want to go by train from Paris to Moscow, you have to take a specific route. You get on a specific train and then others until you finally arrive in Moscow. Similarly, you cannot attain Enlightenment haphazardly. To attain the Buddha-Nature, or God-Consciousness, you need to understand where you are going and exactly what you need to do to get there.

Something has to take place inside you. You may wake up one day and say “I am going to find the Truth. I know it is there and I will find it in this lifetime, now.”

Excerpt from The Journey Within (Pg7-9)

Related Reads: 

• The Mystery of Death
• The Questions Who Am I, Determines Your Life
• The Divine Presence, Shekinah, is in Everything
• The Law of your Being