The End of All Our Exploring

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets contains the best translation of Vedanta – the end of teaching, the culmination of knowledge. We start at home, embark on a journey initiated by deep longing, only to return home and ‘know the place for the first time’. A good teaching brings itself to an end. Awareness of being is our first and last experience – they are the same. The spiritual path is a journey from yourself to yourself – no journey at all. Everything you know about the world is mediated through thought and perception. The only immediate knowledge not mediated is your knowledge of yourself – the awareness of being. Through this you have direct access to reality. In pure awareness of being, there is no time, space, limits. This is your most intimate, ordinary experience, shining as ‘I am’. Once you know and are this, your journey ends. You have come home.