losing all and getting everything in return

the spiritual quest is not one of striving to bring about or attain truth, but of allowing truth to reveal itself as it already is.

one fundamental misperception we suffer under in the quest for spiritual realization is that enlightenment must be gotten, as if it were some kind of accessory that can be added on to pre-existing identity structures. in this fantasy we'd become supercharged versions of our same basic selves; new and improved in certain respects, but maintaining the same old foundational belief in our intrinsic being as existing separately from everything else.

in other words, we'd like to have our cake (holding on to our belief in separate selfhood) and eat it too (experiencing the clarity and peace of enlightenment). these conflicting drives can keep us in a potentially endless loop where seemingly sincere spiritual striving is sabotaged by the underlying fear of letting go of erroneous yet intensely familiar interpretations of reality.

often as spiritual seekers, rather than being willing to give something up, what we really want is to get more. this is simply an extension of the same impulse that tells us we need a newer car, bigger house, better hairstyle. the impulse to get more, to have new things - material or spiritual - is based upon a fundamental resistance to things as they are. this resistance is exactly what keeps us separated from the actual experience of enlightenment, which is nothing more than the realization of what we really are and the accompanying understanding that what we previously thought ourselves to be was a misperception - an illusion.

in a certain sense, realization comes at a price. we must sacrifice our illusory beliefs before the blinding veil can be dispensed with and things revealed as they truly are. in feeding our fantasies we remain blinded to the truth, but they have become so familiar to us that giving them up can be extremely difficult. the problem is that we have become so identified with the illusion that we believe it is what we are, and letting it go seems tantamount to losing ourselves - in a sense, dying.

gaining real spiritual insight involves a radical process of letting go, not necessarily of material possessions (that would make it easy) but of our very foundational beliefs about who and what we are. our mind-made identity is what's nearest and dearest to us. it's the hardest thing to give up, but it must be surrendered in order to break free from the trap of egoic consciousness. the very thing we'd most like to hold on to (or to be more accurate, what we most fear letting go of) is the very thing that's holding us back from enlightened awareness.

paradoxically, when we become motivated by enough faith and courage to let even our most foundational beliefs about self evaporate (in other words, to release absolutely everything by dying to our moment-to-moment conception of self as we know it), at the very moment when it seems we will indeed evaporate, die, and forever disappear into oblivion, our limited egoic consciousness dissolves into a larger awareness that acknowledges itself as inseparable from everything - as one with all that is.