cover story

Each of us is living with a cover story

You've probably seen movies or read novels where one of the characters has a cover story. Perhaps he's a spy, so he needs a false identity, a fake name, a fake history, a fake reason for being in the place where he is. It's all been made up to give him cover, so that nobody knows who he really is. And each of us is really living like this. We have this so called identity: a name, a job perhaps, a nationality, a whole story, a history behind us. And if somebody asks us who we are, we regurgitate all this. We bring it all out again, the same story, the same name, the same purpose, role.

But it's not who we really are. It's a cover story. And the spiritual journey is really the inquiry into who I really am. It's an exploration, an inner exploration. If we take away that cover story, who are we underneath it all? This is our work on the spiritual journey. 

I call it our homework because not only are we discovering who we really are, but in doing so we are coming home, home to ourself, and at the same time home to existence. And this is the miracle of the spiritual journey, the miracle of life is that if we do this work, then we come to discover that we are not separate from existence, that we are existence, the whole of existence. And that's rather difficult to put into words. And it's rather impersonal. And that's why most people go through their whole life without realising that their personal identity is nothing but a cover story.