The Journey’s End Is Where We Began

You know that you are, before you know anything else about yourself. This knowing was there before you had a name, a body, a history, or a single thought about who you are. It remains with you now, present beneath every experience you have, and it will be the last thing left when everything else falls away.

T.S. Eliot, in his epic poem Four Quartets, wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.1

That statement describes the entire spiritual path. When you are born, the very first experience you have is the experience of being. Before you know you are a body, before you know you have just been born, before you know you are a girl or a boy, before you know anything, you know the simple, intimate experience of being.

When you are on your deathbed, everything will have been taken away from you. You will no longer know that you are a person, that you are a man or a woman, that you are a mother or a father, that you are a brother or a sister. All that will remain is the experience of being.

The experience of being at your birth and the experience of being at your death are identical. None of the experiences that you have ever had, however wonderful or awful they may have been, have affected your being.

This simple experience of being is the undercurrent of your life, the background of every experience, shining quietly but brightly in you, as you.

Your being touches all experience intimately but no experience touches it.

Your being is always shining with the same luminosity, the same brightness. It is whole, perfect, complete. It lacks for nothing. It is silent, still, at peace.

The art of meditation or prayer is, first, to recognise the presence of being behind all experience and, second, to recognise the nature of the being that you essentially are – its inherent peace, its fullness or sufficiency, and the fact that it is shared with everyone and everything. In other words, its nature is love.

The art of life could be said to be simply this: to remain in touch with being, to remain as being, and to express its innate qualities of peace, quiet joy and love to the best of your ability in all your activities and relationships.

Just as your spiritual path must sooner or later come to an end in being, so too the teaching must come to an end. A teaching that does not bring itself to its own ending is not an efficient teaching.

And what remains when the teaching comes to an end? Peace on the inside; love on the outside.

What remains when exploration comes to an end is what was always there – the peace of your being, unchanged by anything that has ever happened to it. If you would like to encounter that directly, Living in Peace, Living as Peace is an invitation to arrive where you started, and know the place for the first time.