You are already HERE!

We can never get to the finish line in spirituality.  We are striving so hard to find the answers, all the while the truth of it is always right here, always just right this very moment itself.  So ultimately the striving is also just that - but we're seemingly wrapped up in that search.  So the suffering is there, even as a method to get out of suffering.

We've been reading and listening to all sorts of different opinions on spirituality - repeat "who am I" until you pass out - sit in a cave until your toes are frostbitten - grow a long, flowing beard and smile a lot...  these things have nothing to do with it.  

You are a prisoner of your own beliefs.  The way out of that is to face those beliefs head on - challenge them - doubt them - see if there are other possibilities.  Were you really born?  Did you come into existence?  What came into existence?  What appeared?  Did you arrive anew or did a new pattern take shape?  When you die, what dies?  The pattern dissolves, but do you dissolve?  

And it's really simple, after all.  Life IS - there is one "existence" - something IS, right here and now.  That IS-ness expresses as everything we see and know.  That intelligence takes shape in a million-billion ways, from the ugliest to that which is so beautiful it makes you cry.  If we reject the ugly in preference for the beautiful, then in essence we have missed the point.  It's like saying that this particular wave is better than that one - when they are both, in essence, ocean.  

To get to the finish line is not possible.  You are already HERE!  So either the finish line is a fantasy or you are already past it, right now.  Find out once and for all.