“When you are willing to stop searching for home and tell the truth about what is already here, you discover directly for yourself that you have always been home. Leaving was a dream.”

You Are Home

What I am pointing to is simple. You can acknowledge everything that has come before—the dysfunctions of your mind, your emotions, your body, and the dysfunctions of our world. You can acknowledge all this and then stop. In that stopping, you will discover that you are always home. You will recognize that throughout this imaginary journey to return home, you actually never left home.

Papaji used this analogy: You leave your home for a walk in the woods and suddenly find yourself lost. You try this path and that path but to no avail. You feel even more lost. Then a kind of panic sets in, and a great sadness arises: “I am lost. I am lost. I don’t know the way home.” Then suddenly, surprisingly, the way home is evident and you make your way home. You felt like you were lost. You certainly experienced that you were lost. You acted like you were lost. It looked to others like you were lost. But now that you are home, can you say you were ever really lost?

You experience separation because you love the experience of reunion. You experience being lost in the woods so that you can experience the relief of finding your way home. And all of this occurs here, at home, where you always and already are.

There is nothing wrong with this experience, but if you are ready to be found, then come home. Stop. Be still. If you are willing to inquire into the deepest truth, you will find that you are home. If you are not ready, you can continue your experience of being lost and separate from home. When you are ready, you will know it. You will raise your hand and say, "I desire to know the truth of home. More than my enjoyment of wandering, more than my infatuations, I have a love of truth." You will see that truth is here, simply waiting all this time for you to come home. Whatever flavors are passing through home, whatever states and experiences are passing through home, home is here, where you always are.

The invitation of home is to lose every definition you have of who you are and where home is. Lose every version of yourself. When everything is lost, what remains? This is self-realization.

We hope that self-realization will make us nicer people, or make us feel good all the time, or make us immune to certain challenges, but that hope is itself a postponement. That hope is a discussion in the mind about what you need to be happy and fulfilled, about what you need to find home. When you are willing to stop searching, when you are willing to stop trying to give the search what you think it needs to take you home, you directly discover for yourself that you never really left. No matter what you are experiencing, no matter what you are feeling, no matter what you are thinking, the core of yourself, who you truly are, is always here. You are home. You are home itself.

Let yourself be home.

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