The Purpose of Spiritual Practice: What Are You Actually Trying to Achieve?

Few spiritual seekers clarify what they're actually trying to achieve. The question seems obvious, enlightenment! But enlightenment means vastly different things to different people. Your actual goal shapes the entire path.

Some seek enlightenment as escape, escape from suffering, from death, from the difficulties of existence. This goal is understandable but problematic. It tends to create a spirituality of denial and dissociation. You use practices to avoid rather than transform. You become increasingly detached and removed from life rather than more engaged.

Some seek enlightenment as achievement, something to accomplish, to attain, to add to their resume. This generates tremendous effort but usually reinforces ego. You become the person who's practicing, striving, advancing. The practice becomes about building a better self rather than transcending the illusion of self.

Some seek enlightenment as power, to have special abilities, psychic powers, influence over others, supernatural knowledge. This attracts many seekers initially. But practices aimed at power develop abilities that typically reinforce ego and attachment. The person with powers usually becomes more contracted, not more free.

Some seek enlightenment as peace or happiness, permanent comfort, freedom from difficulty, bliss states. This is understandable because spiritual experiences often feel blissful. But genuine realization doesn't necessarily feel pleasant. It might be peaceful but also challenging. It might feel joyful but also fierce. The goal of permanent comfort usually keeps people attached to experiences rather than moving toward genuine transformation.

Some seek enlightenment as understanding, to know truth, to comprehend reality accurately, to see through illusions. This is a more sophisticated goal that can genuinely serve transformation. Yet even this can become intellectual, collecting insights and understanding without actual transformation of being.

The highest understanding of enlightenment recognizes it as the complete dissolution of the separate self in unified consciousness. Not achieving something but releasing everything. Not becoming something but recognizing what you already are. Not gaining power but releasing the need for power. Not finding peace but releasing resistance to what is.

This goal, when genuinely pursued, transforms everything. It means you're willing to be stripped of all comfort, all achievement, all understanding if necessary. You're willing to lose everything because you recognize that what you're actually seeking transcends anything you could gain.

This sounds radical. But it's more honest. If you're pursuing a goal to enhance your comfort, you're still operating from attachment. True awakening occurs when you're willing to release even the goal of awakening if that's what's required.

The advanced practice involves clarifying your actual goal and becoming willing to die to all limited goals. Are you seeking comfort? Willing to release it? Seeking achievement? Willing to lose all status? Seeking understanding? Willing to have all understanding shattered?

When you're genuinely willing to release all limited goals, something shifts. The seeking becomes authentic. The practice becomes genuine. And paradoxically, what you were truly seeking becomes available.

This is why Rumi emphasizes abandonment to the Beloved. It's not romantic poetry but the statement of the actual condition that opens realization, complete willingness to lose everything in pursuit of truth.