All my life have I sought the Ultimate: ultimate truth, ultimate perfection, ultimate beauty. I have searched for you everywhere. With arms upraised, have I crossed deserts and watered the earth of innumerable gardens, waiting.
The experience of the ultimate moves like a shadow before me, ever visible, ever elusive. I have only to tremblingly touch it to feel it dart free into the distant blue beyond. One can walk only so far chasing rainbows. It is perhaps inevitable that one eventually pauses to take thought wondering if the shadows were indications of an illusion after all. How can one experience the dawn without first, in a sense, becoming the dawn? How can one see anything without, in the process, seeing oneself? The Self is the mirror through which the universe is reflected. First and foremost, in all we do throughout our lives, we see and experience ourselves. Who we are, the dimensions of the dimensionless Self become apparent in the specificity of our vision. We can only be what we are at every moment of our lives. The desire to know and experience the ultimate is structured into the very fiber of our bones. For a human being, there is no greater need. As the word “ultimate” implies, it refers to the Supreme, the highest ranking desire of which there is none other.
We seek what we are. How could we seek what we did not know? The origin and aim of all seeking is the same. The path to the ultimate is not a path. It begins and ends within oneself. We need not go anywhere. It is only necessary to be still in order to realize that the voice that seems to beckon from afar is none other than one’s own voice echoing within the chamber of one’s own heart. The ultimate truth that one seeks is the primordial silence that gave birth to the Word, the pre-conceptual indefinable substratum of the world. The ultimate truth that we hunger for we cannot find until we become that which we seek, until the world within becomes capable of reflecting the world within the world without. In order to experience the truth, we must become the truth. The primordial ocean of our existence has to become capable of reflecting the ultimate value of everything having enlivened the ultimate value of itself. Truth is the lotus that arises from the confluence of the ultimate within with the ultimate without. The ultimate truth being that there is no within and no without. There is only perpetual union, only silence moving in silence.
The ultimate truth lies in Being, rather than in knowing or doing. Ultimately the truth is unutterable. The search for it is the search for the Self.
barbara ann briggs 