Coming Home to the Infinite Within You

Life is change for the human being. It’s always growing, declining, dying, and being born. It is an inevitable aspect of life for us. Yet many people attempt to use spirituality to avoid this undeniable human truth. They hope to find some form of safe comfort in the external world, and thus, many spiritual seekers are essentially refugees from this truth. This happens for innumerable reasons, but mainly, it happens because people fear pain and death.

But pain and death are here. And no “home” can be so safe that it is devoid of these things.

As people mature on the spiritual path, we learn to let go of this kind of seeking. We seek refuge in spirituality by letting go of “home” and residing in the changeless space that embraces all this change. This is what I mean when I say that we come home to the infinite within us. We cannot deny change in our human forms. Rather, we can embrace the infinite love, presence, and serenity that we are all part of, and through that depth, we accept all the pain, death, hate, love, joy, ecstasy, and everything else that comes up in human life. We accept all of it as part of our home.

Wanting to go Home

Many people have this deep yearning to go home. For many sensitive and psychic people, there’s a sense that home isn’t in a human body or in this world. I can neither say if this is right or wrong, but if you are here in a human body, then you are here. This is the gift of this present moment, and it can be embraced as a gift. To do so starts by looking at those deeper yearnings and desires for home to investigate where they really come from. Many people will find out that those desires are corrupted by past pain and social ideas about what home should be (In a lot of Western Culture, it’s the 3 bedroom home with a white picket fence). Many people will find out that a lot of concepts have twisted themselves into this urge to find a feeling of home, and that feeling can never be entrusted to the external world. Because if you have a good feeling–a feeling of home–in a place, that place can change. Or you can change. Which is part of what happens when someone awakens. They wake up, and then all the ideas that were involved in believing something felt good or felt like home may momentarily be broken.

I say momentarily because awakening tends to be more of a break in the stream of incessant thinking and believing. Since most people don’t stay in that sacred pause in the infinite, they tend to fall right back down in their old stream of thinking again. But it’s not the same. It’s not the same because something is now conscious that there can be awake-ness and at-sleep-ness. This has the tendency to drive people towards inner change and growth because of the range of good feelings that often arise when someone lets go and awakens. However, those feelings often get enmeshed with ideas of what it means to feel good and at home. And the person starts wanting to go home again, but in a different way. The yearning and searching continue, and oftentimes, few or no places suffice for very long if at all.

Spiritual Awakening and the Touching of Home

Another way to look at a spiritual awakening is that it is a touching of home. Or rather, awakening is a relaxing into this space that already Is. It is truly a strange thing to find this amazing space within us and to find out that it has been here all along. Typically (but not always), the initial spiritual awakening is a joyful or peaceful event. To be fair, some people find the letting go to be really upsetting, especially if they have not been kind to themselves or others. Then, the revelations that come show them how poorly they’ve behaved and bring about a lot of repentance and sorrow, which the person may not yet be willing to admit is necessary.

Regardless, coming home is a significant moment, and it is an important one. It is so important to come home within ourselves because our external homes can be taken from us. There are few major life events quite so upsetting as becoming a refugee. Because of a variety of wars going on, millions of people are displaced in the world today. They have lost their external homes. At any given time, anybody can lost their physical abode due to a natural disaster, and that simply shows the importance of coming to our true home. And our true home is that infinite space within us.

What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

Abiding in the Infinite

We are always abiding in the infinite. This leads many to wonder why they don’t “feel” at home all the time then. But as I’ve mentioned before, feelings are different than the infinite. “Feelings” are different emotions that we have that are the result of our thoughts and beliefs as well as different biochemicals in the body. This inner human soup is always changing. It always will. The same goes for our physical sensations. You can simply ask someone with chronic pain about how their body feels, and they’ll tell you it doesn’t feel good. But they–like everyone else–can still abide in the infinite while being in physical pain.

Coming home can be “done” simply by bringing more of our focus to the infinite within us. In that space of clear seeing that notices all of our feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations, we can peacefully observe the arising and passing of all different experiences. In this space of home, we can move from one living space to the next, from one relationship to the next, and so on while staying undisturbed by life. The minute you have a belief about life or want something from it, which includes wanting a good feeling, you will find yourself agitated and constantly trying to hold on or push away things in life. To be sure, there are plenty of conscious actions we take to live healthy lives. We are caretakers to our hearts, minds, and bodies. But so much of the rest of life is not actually that interesting after we meet our basic needs. Even in spaces of dire stress, we can return to the infinite, and from that space, we can make the most clear and most important decisions. In times of great stress, this coming home is even more vital to do the best we can from a place of love and clarity.

The Loss of Interest in the External Homes

Still, many people will go on searching for a better home, community, relationship, experiences in general, and so on. You will likely find a great many feelings, some of which will feel amazing. But then that feeling/experience/state of consciousness passes. Over time, many spiritual seekers mature and realize that nothing in the external world can truly give them what they want. In that maturing, there comes a loss of interest in external feelings of home as well as most external things. Parts of those old beliefs that had you scouring the world for safety or clinging to one type of situation slough away. You find yourself naturally residing more and more in the infinite because it is already here, and you have always been home.