Inner-Science: Our Mystical Home

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. (Thich Nhat Hanh gems, instagram.com)

As a deep lifelong Buddhist practitioner Thich Nhat Hanh speaks his simple truth with clarity and compassion. In our western culture of rugged individualism most of us find instructions to “go home” disorienting to say the least. To a mystic, the instructions are orienting. While it is true that we are all mystics (and I hear this often now), it is not true that we are all practicing or even aware of that inner-ability.

We are afraid of what we don’t know. Even the spacious home-base of a mystic becomes a fearful experience. This points to a thorny conundrum in our spiritual evolution of mystic embodiment. It goes something like this: as we don’t know ourselves in spaciousness, we are afraid of it and avoid it at all costs. Constant social media distraction begins to feel like a safer home then the one Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to go back to. Jesus also told us to “go home” by reminding us (in the language of his time) that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) when the Pharisees asked him when the Kingdom of God would come.

The strong message among all mystics is that we are missing the mark in our search for meaning by looking outside of ourselves. We wait for outer-sceince to lead the way while remaining ignorant of our inner-home. A soul-home where everything we ever wanted is met unconditionally in a beauty and grace far beyond our wildest imagination. A beauty that takes our breath away. A grace that makes us weep in sorrow and joy because our heart finds the soft welcoming of home.

In the west, and increasingly in the east, we are knowing ourselves through a separation between the world out there and me. From this separation we grow a life-is-happening-to-me, rather than through-and-with-me. Without the inner listening capacity of the mystic, we know ourselves only through concepts and structures external to ourselves. We often wait for “outer-science” to prove what “inner-science” knows intuitively. We have become very comfortable — even insistent — that the truest reality is outside of ourselves.

Relentlessly seeking on the outside through our consumerism, our constant travel, and even our habits of war: we know ourselves through possession of something outside ourselves. The tragic nature of our external seeking is that we are consuming the body or vessel of our own mystical nature and true home. We have forgotten who we are and our journey to our true inner-home has become mired in confusion and darkness.

We need a more spacious container; either through a group or through our own inner spaciousness. In silence we encounter places of rest that are beyond the everyday-self of our lives. It is the most gloriously refreshing encounter one can have. We know life and ourselves differently in this timeless reunion. Its beauty and wonder can literally take our breath away.