Where have you been going all this time? Where is this search leading you? And where are you right now? The answer to all these questions is very simple: nowhere. The direction in which you presumed yourself to be headed for much of this lifetime will not lead you where you now wish to go. So that path was leading nowhere. The quest for the enlightenment that has remained ever elusive leads you to the same destination, for there is nowhere for you to be beyond where you are right now. So long as you believe that there is a destination just past the horizon, where you are is nowhere.
Your transference of your ambition from the arena of the material to the realm of the spiritual changes nothing. You remain in an unrelenting quest for that which you perceive yourself to be without. So long as you are neither here nor there, you are nowhere. You are in a netherworld of striving—a state that invalidates the reality of where you are in deference to where you believe you are not. When, in fact, Nowhere is where you most fervently wish to be—and where you have been all along.
The destination toward which you assume you are traveling in your spiritual quest is not a destination at all. For a destination, by definition, is somewhere other than where you are. And where you are is all there is and ever can be—which is Nowhere. All that can be changed is your perception of that blessed state. So long as you perceive yourself to be short of the mark, you will experience discontentment, regardless of how far you believe yourself to have journeyed. When you are able to embrace the “here and now” moment as a joyous statement of your beingness, regardless of where you perceive yourself to be, you will have arrived. For there Is nowhere “to Be.” Once there, One simply Is. One is everywhere. Which, by definition, is Nowhere.
This “now” moment in which you find yourself is a statement of perfection you have made to the universe. It is the perfect answer to the parameters you have set up. It is the perfect reflection of your attitudes, your beliefs, your understandings, and your conscious, physical manipulations of the illusion you believe to be your life. This is where you most wish to be. This very moment. Right now. This is the culmination of all that has gone before. And it is here to deliver unto you a treasure, provided that you are willing to receive it. Yet, as long as you deny the perfection in this “now” moment and the circumstances with which it has gifted you, you will be destined to continue to wander, and to search, and to strive, and to yearn for something that will always remain just out of reach.
The opportunity in this “now” moment is to stop all of this activity—and simply Be still. For it is in the stillness that you will, ultimately, discover what has been there all this time—Nothing. Nothing at all. No great bright lights. No profound “cosmic” ideas. No other to which you can connect in order to be complete. No sense of attainment. No overwhelming feelings of self-worth. All these things are trappings of a linear illusion you will have left behind when you venture forth into what is truly reality.
In the stillness there Is—Nothing. No-thing to “have.” For in order to experience “having,” it is necessary to have known “not having,” a sense that something is missing. In a state of perfection, nothing can be missing. So there can only Be—Everything. Where there is Everything, there can be nothing more. And that state is only possible when there is Nothing—nothing more to want. For in that No-thing-ness, All That Is—is present.
And who will you be when you find yourself engulfed in that infinite stillness? Will you be who you are right now? Will you be someone else—some higher, smarter, more polished version of the one you think is you? No, on both counts. The one who emerges in Self-perception in the infinite Stillness is—No-one. For, by definition, you cannot be in the infinite Stillness. Nothing can be there. No-one can be there. And yet, in the depths of quietude you will touch upon, you will experience awareness. And at the same time you will know that there is nothing “there” to be aware of.
Who is it that is experiencing that awareness? It cannot be you because you cannot be there. The only possibility? No-one. That is ultimately who you will discover yourself to Be. For in order to be “someone,” that which you are, there would have to be that which you are not. Neither can be in the infinite Stillness, for nothing can be there. Therefore, in that state of blessed awareness, you can only Be No-one. And at the same time, your awareness is All That Is there. In the Stillness, you will understand yourself to Be—That.
When you step out of the illusion, even for a fleeting moment, and relinquish your grasp on your so-called reality, there is the ever-present possibility that you may lose yourself in a reality that knows neither future nor past. For in that state of awareness, there can only be Now. And that state of Now-ness Is All That Is—the ever-present, present tense you embody, in reality.
In the illusion, you have a past. And in your mind, you are forever reaching for, and longing for, and living in—the future that never seems to come. In the Stillness, you experience that all pervading Now-ness and recognize it as All That Is. You experience your awareness as ever-present, there in the eternal Now. And you understand your awareness to Be that Now-ness—a sense of presence melded in Oneness with the eternal All That Is.
It is with that sense of presence, that sense of Self-awareness, that you may choose to revisit, and to experience the illusion you consider to be your life. You may choose to experience that sense of sublime detachment—that Isness which you tasted fleetingly in the Stillness—and to experience the “here and now” as All That Is. For within the polarity of all that the illusion Is, and in the polarity of all that it Is not, is the full spectrum of Isness that is no more or less than All That Is. The illusion is everywhere—and Nowhere. It is everything—and Nothing. It is You—the real You who has let go of the trappings of identity and knows itself to be No-one, here in the infinite foreverness of Now.
