Finding Your True Home

Finding your truest nature.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

A Letter to My Daughters and Readers.

Home

Have you ever felt at home? Truly, sincerely, home. So overwhelming or evident that you couldn’t rationally explain how this feeling of being home came about. I am fortunate enough to have had this experience. I want you to feel this too. For home, to find you.

I wanted to write this letter as a mission statement for the Laughing Stoic Buddha project. I’m still discovering and refining this newsletter's mission for myself. But the working idea is: Find Your Truest Nature and Live a Meaningful/Magical Life. This letter gives a kind of teaser to the “truest nature…magical life” piece of the project. But really, it points to my greatest wish for my readers.   

The experience I am describing is ineffable (too great or extreme to express or describe in words). When I use the word “home,” I use it as a poetic pointer to a sense that transcends any or all description. Because we have no perfect tool to translate one’s personal subjective experience to someone else’s experience, we are left with the imperfect tool of language.

Music. Poetry. Visual art. These are beautiful tools to express the ineffable as well. Listen to Johann Sebastian Bach or John Coltrane. Read Rumi or Mary Oliver. Look at a Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock painting. All these point to something beyond description. Beyond our habitual ways of thinking, or convincing, of life. They are pointing us home.

Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass, described his first Psilocybin mushroom trip as a terrifying experience in which he watched his identity slowly dissolve. First, “Richard,” the Harvard professor, disappeared, then Richard, the son, the friend, until his whole sense of personal identity was gone. He thought, “At least I still have my body.” But he looked down and saw nobody either. Surprisingly, once nobody was left to identify with, the first thought that came to him was, “I’m Home.”   

I am not suggesting that you have to eat Psilocybin to find this home that Ram Dass speaks of. I didn’t have to, nor did countless mystics and ordinary people throughout history. This is to demonstrate what finding a home can feel like. 

This is what is beautiful about finding a home. You will know it when you’re there. You will see that it has been right here all along. Closer than closer. We don’t have to travel or satisfy any outstanding requirements to find it. Home is always available, right here and now, without needing to see it. 

In this letter, I hope to do the same for you. I can’t give it to you. I can’t pick you up and carry you home, even if you want me to. But with the words on this page, I can point you home. The home that has always been here, but so many of us spend much of our time missing it.

Home=This Moment

This home I am pointing to is “this moment.” Not the thoughts or labels you place upon this moment. Not your idea or concept of being present in the now. Home is here and now, just as it is.

 This moment is here before (before) any thought you have about the moment. This moment is still here after ideas disappear into the space between thoughts. Now is, just as it is. 

This moment is not a thing or a noun. It is alive. Presence is a verb. This moment is presenting itself to us here and now. It is the living sense in which all appear. The names or ideas we place upon this moment kill it. 

Like trying to capture a raging river in a jar, we can’t grasp this moment with a word, idea, concept, or thought. Like dipping a pot into a river and taking it home to say, “Look, I brought the Colorado River with me.” As soon as we try to describe, or even think about, this moment, we miss the most crucial part, the presence. We miss the vivid, alive activity that is here and now before any description of it.  

This moment is all there is. All there was and all there ever will be. Yes, the past happened. But when it happened, it was happening in the present moment. Where else could it happen? When we think about history or imagine the future, we can only ever do that here and now.

A helpful question to meditate on to break the illusion of the past and future existing separate from this moment is this: When did this moment start? When will this moment end? If we pay close attention, we’ll arbitrarily break the eternal now into moments. Without the mind segregation and labeling of our experience, how would we know when this moment started or ended? 

This is why the transcendent sense of being home is so intimate with a sense of being in this moment. When we realize that we have always been right here, right now, we see that this moment is a home we could never really leave. We can’t be out of this moment. We could only feel like we were not present. We can feel like we’ve left home, and everyone has this sensation at different points in their life, but from this perspective, we never actually leave this home.  

We Are in This Moment 

One of the most direct ways to point to our current relationship is to say it’s not a relationship. We are at this moment. Not who you take yourself to be. Not your name, titles in family or career, autobiographical story, personality, not your likes or dislikes. This moment is here. Just as it is. We are here. Whether we are telling the story of our identity or not. We are still here, not at the moment, but at the moment. 

My teacher Paul Hedderman says trying to get into the moment is like trying to fit two into one. If we genuinely existed separately from the moment, we could be in or out of it. But if we are in the moment, we can’t be out of the moment. 

If you and a car are separate, you can leave the car and walk away. But you can’t walk away from yourself. Wherever you go, you bring yourself with you. Likewise, a car can’t drive away from itself. 

This is how most of us intuitively think of being in the moment or being home. We believe we are inherently separate from this moment and must find it and “be in it.” This is where you get the phenomenon of people saying, “It’s so much work to be present in the now.” 

The truth, again, is the opposite. Nothing is more accessible than being here now because you can’t be anywhere else. We have been working incredibly hard our whole life, trying to be out of the moment. We are distracting ourselves with every imaginable form of entertainment. But most of all, we delight ourselves with discursive, repetitive thought streams about the past, future, or anything but what is present, here and now.

For almost everyone, there is no more deeply established habit or addiction than the mental chatter about the past and future and commentary about what is happening now. This is why people report that it is so challenging to be present. Not because it inherently takes a lot of effort but because we are breaking an addiction. The addiction to trying to be out of the moment. 

There is almost nothing more complicated for a cigarette smoker than to stop smoking. However, the actual activity of not smoking takes less effort than the activity of smoking. When you smoke, you must go to the store, buy the cigarettes, get a lighter, find a place to smoke, light the cigarette, and find a place to discard the bud. Not to mention all the adverse health effects of smoking, which creates more work in the future, i.e., hospital appointments, medication, and so on.     

For someone that never starts smoking, not smoking is effortless. A nonsmoker doesn’t have to do anything not to smoke. However, while many people never start smoking, everyone starts thinking and, by this, becomes addicted to trying to be out of the moment. This is why people report that it is so hard to be present. For the same reason, a smoker says it’s hard not to smoke. 

The truth is, once we break the addiction to trying to get out of the moment, we see that being present, at this moment, here and now, is the easiest, most effortless thing imaginable. What practice can help to break our addiction to trying to get out of this moment? Meditation. Contemplation. Journal. Yoga. Some just read about it or listen to teachers speak about it. There are so many ways to break this addiction. To create inner stillness and silence so that home can reveal itself to you. Like all recovery from addiction, it starts with accepting your problem and asking a power greater than yourself for help.      

Conclusion

This is not a prescription. This letter aims to point in a different direction than we usually direct our attention. To give you a sense of a simple yet radically different way of relating to life. Instead of endlessly looking towards some future arrival or reminiscing on past glory, we can see the greatest gift in life in the here and now. This moment is the arrival. This is the glory. The Kingdom of Heaven is here and now. Where else could it be?

I hope that the music of this letter has pointed you home. It has hinted at the open secret right in front of us. We are already home. We’ve already arrived. We can’t be anywhere but here and now. There is no escaping this moment because there is nothing to escape from and nowhere to run. We are already free.

Wisdom comes with realizing and accepting the paradox that being in this moment is the most natural thing imaginable. Still, it takes great practice and persistence to break the habit of trying to be out of the moment. At the same time, I hope this letter has given a sense of relief, however momentary, from this habit. Like all good things, it takes repetition and time.

This is one of the main goals of my writing and the Laughing Stoic Buddha project. To share the most helpful practices and techniques I have come across to claim our birthright to be present in life's beauty, awe, and wonder. If this sounds like a worthy pursuit to you, keep reading. Follow that feeling at home. Listen for the whispers of your soul.