The Overcoming of Oneself - by Swami Chidananda

excerpt from A Call to Liberation – by Swami Chidananda (Chapter 54. The Overcoming of Oneself)

Seeking, questing are words used for lack of more suitable words. They are words taken from the context of the external space-time dimension of one’s life, where, when one loses something, one has to find; one seeks here, there, everywhere. Lacking other terms, we make use of these words also in regard to the mystical inner dimension of our spiritual being, even though they do not convey within the same meaning that they convey in the outer dimension.

There is no seeking. There is nothing that is lost. Everything is found. Only we are not aware that it is there. There may be a finding, but there is no seeking. If an old grandfather has pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and then hunts all over for them thinking he has lost them, he needs to discover or be told: “You have not lost them. They are right there.” Even so, you have only to rediscover, to remember, recollect, remove this Self-forgetfulness. That is the situation in the spiritual life.

Therefore, indeed, this is a mysterious inward journey, an attainment of a thing which has never been non-attained. For you are the Being whom you are seeking. You are already That which you want to be. But great effort is required to discard the persistent wrong idea that you are something else.

And the essence of this is the word persistence. You have to persevere and you have to persist. If you stop breathing, in a short time you will cease to exist biologically. Even so, to put an end to Self-forgetfulness, to the alienation of oneself from one’s own true, essential, eternal Self – to discard the hollow, erroneous wrong notion of a spurious, transitory, non-existent identity – effort should be kept up in an unbroken stream of a newly awakened consciousness.