People are looking for a home in experience – or rather an experience that feels like a home. When they are at home, they are not out there, separated from their origin. They have returned to something that allows them to be at ease. (By “home” I mean an existential home, not the actual home, or a nostalgic childhood home, of individuals.)
A religious experience can be described as a homecoming, a return, a definitive answer to the fundamental ubitas, a recurring and insisting “where am I?”. When one returns home, one does not need to leave anymore. The existential location has been defined not in contrast to the surroundings, or by geographic coordinates, but by experience itself. It is an affirming answer to the question: “Do you know where you are?”
The irony of “looking for one’s true self” is that people look inward when they should be looking out in the universe. Only by witnessing their own existence through their own being can they actually recognize that they exist in the world, as a mind and a body.
To find home, follow the echo of your self.
“It’s all in your mind”, is an explanation often given by New-Age folks, Neo-Platonists, or Cyber-Gnostic Matrix fans. These ideas can be either dismissed as individualist solipsism (“all of this exist in MY mind”), or more rarely understood as a limitation set by a mind that is dampening its resonating potential with complicated and overlapping feedback loops that cancel out their own resonance; in much simpler words: we can potentially find everything by tracing back our mind, but too many conceptual explanations obscure the direct experience.
Finding a home in one’s own experience is allowing the self to merge together with the resonance of the world. In this experience the individual disappears and becomes one with the phenomenal world. This experience may be considered ‘religious’ because it transcends all ready-made concepts, and without an ego in the way, the experience might evoke a sensation of ‘being in God’ or ‘being the ultimate truth’ — although verbalising or defining the experience conceptually will inevitably push it further back from the unhinged openness it requires.
To find home, follow the echo of your self. Follow the echo, and keep your mind quiet.