The Mission is to find Home Base– the particular spot on the planet where you can unravel even your most darkest thoughts and not feel in danger for revealing them. When I was a young Catholic boy it was the confessional followed by three “Hail Mary”s and three “Our Fathers.” I would come away from that location feeling cleansed. What ever had dirtied my thoughts, or what ever cheating interaction that I had had with the world would disappear and I was once again in the arms of good graces of a warm home.
Around the season of Christmas many of us feel an need to be home and safe, but many times the home that we think is home is really just another place on earth, and not really the trusted home that is our heart’s desires. Coming home to Nazareth, to Bethlehem, or Chicago is not the same as coming home to our hearts. In a Christmas message the Vietnam Buddhist Monk, Thich Naht Hanh wrote the following:
“There is no way home, Home is the way.”
What does it mean to say, “Home is the Way”?
In order to put his phrase in perspective we have to look at what it means for us to be home. For many it is a feeling of safety, a feeling of being cared for and loved, a feeling that even if everything is not right in the world, I can find that place inside my heart where things are all right within me. Home is a sacred spot, a soul, a mental location, a psychic event that is characterized by being in a compassionate relationship with the self.
Easier said than done!
The process of finding in the self, the confessional of my youth, requires that I stop, look and listen for the very echoes that use to beat in the heart of a child. The heart of a child is not concerned with the future. A child can stop to amuse himself/herself with a clothespin, or with a tray of sand and a toy truck. Returning to the center of who we were before we started pasting life on in layers is something we forget to deliberately do. We forget where we left ourselves and it is an east thing to do.
Actually forgetting who we are is the default position of our ego. The ego is in charge of covering life over with the events that occur to us or occur in front of us. As little children we incorporate these event and begin to think that we are the event that happened to us. But we are wrong to stop there despite the fact that stopping there seems pretty natural to or egos.
Finding home inside, finding what brings peace to my insanity, finding what brings serenity to my chaos is an inside job. Removing the layers of acquired victimization is not easy only because it is not the default position. The default position is to add one more event to the pile of events that we think has defines us.
In fact these life events have defined our egos, not our selves. To meet the wider, deep self and to find the consciousness that existed before the layering began, we need to be quiet; and the thing that most disturbs that quiet is that passive, ever blaring voice running like a ticker tape in the back of our heads.
No one can tell us exactly how quieting the mind can be done. In the same way that you can not “teach” a baby to walk. Walking is a natural function that will occur in time with desire to reach something. The desire to reach something is the center piece of being able to stop, calm the mind and listen for the silence.
Once silent we can order a paradigm shift toward what ever it is that we know will give us the feeling of warmth that every home needs. A house can be cold, but a home is always warm. Desire for freedom from the cold begins the journey home.