One of the biggest realizations for spiritual growth is that absolutely everything comes and goes. Well, not everything.... There is one thing that never comes and goes, and that is consciousness itself — our true nature. The only thing in our life that is permanent. However, thoughts, sensations, emotions, all come and go. They are impermanent. But yet we seem to always get lost in these and identify with them as soon as they arise. Deep down we know that nothing is ever permanent. We have suffered countless times in our lives, and yet everytime suffering arises, we tend to think that "this time it's special! I've never felt this way before... Maybe it'll go away if I resist or wish it away even more!" The circumstances to why we suffer might be completely new, and the narrative and scenarios that we play out in our mind might not have happened to us before. That's true. But the SENSATION it causes in our body i.e. stress, worry, anxiety, unease, etc. have been present in our bodymind countless times before. We forget that everytime we've suffered, it's always gone away after a while. So the question is: Why are we always resisting these sensations as if we've never felt them before? When we can learn to not resist pain or grasp on to joy, but rather realize that we've felt the exact same sensations before — to learn to accept the arising and falling of sensations without resentment or clinging — we have cracked a massive code to self-realization. If we can learn this absolute truth, if we can realize that everything is impermanent, and that that in us which is able to see that everything is impermanent IS what is permanent, we'll be on to something really great. If we can learn to identify with what IS permanent in us — that which never comes and goes — we'll be realizing a new sense of peace.

If I seek myself in all those things that I think will give me salvation, I will remain unhappy. I am seeking my own improvement and fulfillment in some external future "gain." This idea that I can find a "better version of myself" in something that I need to obtain, gain, or achieve, is what is keeping me stuck with the sensation that something is missing in my life. With this belief, that I desperetaly hold on to, I feel like a fragment cut off from the rest of the universe, I become a prisoner within my own conviction. When I drop this conviction — the delusion that happiness is "over there somewhere" — everything seems to magically fall into place, completely effortlessly, and all of a sudden I don't feel like a fragment anymore. I feel connected to something bigger. I find home.

I sense an activity in my mind that WANTS to suffer and feel separate. It's like it wants to grab onto thoughts, identify with them, and suffer from them. This activity is so sneaky as well. But when I take the perspective from consciousness—that everything arises inside consciousness—I'm all of a sudden much better at catching this activity. This is such a fascinating activity to observe within the mind.

It's interesting when being identified with thought activities, how we as humans slip into victimhood, and from there we 'protect' our right to be offended and feel sorry for ourselves. We feel like everyone and everything is working against us. This is Self-abandontment. We abandon the sense of 'I', which makes us feel separate, which makes us suffer. It's almost like we forget this whole insight and understanding that all is one, and that consciousness is the fundamental reality.

Allowing myself to Be, treating it as play, and realizing that there's no destination. I AM the destination. This all brings peace to my mind. But there's also a deep curiosity to keep exploring this. There's a deep desire to adventure my life with this understanding and dive deeper into this.