The Source — Returning to What Was Never Lost
The mystical recognition of the Source — the uncreated ground from which all created things emerge and to which all return — is the universal teaching that underlies all authentic spiritual paths and is the common destination of all genuine seeking.
Every major spiritual tradition identifies a Source — an uncreated, unconditioned ground of being from which all creation emerges and to which it returns: the Tao (the Way that was before heaven and earth), Brahman (the absolute, undivided being-consciousness-bliss), Ein Sof (the Infinite without end), the Godhead beyond the personal God of mystics like Eckhart, the Dharmakaya (the truth-body of the Buddha, ultimate reality itself), the Great Spirit of indigenous traditions, the Allah that precedes and exceeds all names and attributes. What all these point toward is not a place or a state to be achieved in the future but a recognition available in every present moment: that the ground of all being is already here, is already the very substance of awareness itself, and that the entire spiritual journey is not a movement toward the Source but the progressive recognition of what was always already the case.
Return to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one's destiny.
Philosopher of religion Huston Smith's The World's Religions documents, through 50 years of comparative study including personal practice in multiple traditions, that the great world religions, at their mystical cores, all describe the same ultimate reality — different names, different cultural containers, the same Source.
Tao Te Ching