People ask me all the time—why go so deep? Why sit with questions that have unknowable answers? What’s the point of all this spiritual work if the world stays the same?

The most honest answer I can give is that the pain of this world is not random or natural. It is the outer effect of the belief that we are fundamentally separate. When you believe that is true, everything becomes something you have to defend. You start guarding what’s yours like the world is trying to take it or proving your value like you’re in a contest nobody signed up for.

But when you know that the “I” within you is the same “I” within me (not just as an idea, but through lived, direct experience), everything softens. You stop needing to defend yourself, compare, or control. You begin to recognize that no one is ahead or behind, no one more worthy of dignity or safety. There is only one life expressing itself through infinite shapes, longing to be seen by itself in another form.

So if you're still wondering what the point of all this self-inquiry is or what it really accomplishes, I’ll save you a decade of spiritual seeking and hone in on the revelation that sits at the center of it all.

Enlightenment.

It’s a word we tend to assign to the rare holy few, like the sages and monks who seem to hover above the noise of this world. Enlightenment is not for the chosen. It’s something that’s been waiting in you since the beginning underneath all your titles and traumas and temporary forms: I am.

That “I am” is the whole doorway. What follows it may shift with the seasons of your life: I am tired, I am in love, I am a parent, I am healing… but the “I” itself does not change. The one who feels, but is not defined by feeling. The one who moves through joy and grief and still stays whole. It is not your name, your role, your personality, or your past. It isn’t your pain or your opinions or your gifts or your fears. Strip all of that away, and the I still remains. The same silent witness who played in your childhood is reading these words now.

What one gains through spiritual practices is the experiential remembrance that the “I,” often called awareness, is not personal. It is not yours or mine. It moves through each of us in wildly specific and complex ways, but it belongs to no one. It is the constant in a life of ever-shifting forms.

To know this is to awaken. But to recognize it in another being is to remember that we are not separate, but one awareness, meeting itself through many lives. Truly seeing “I” to “I” is recognizing that behind the mask of identity, every being you encounter carries the same light you do. The same root “I” that says I am. I feel. I want. I think. I wish. It becomes much harder not to want nourishment and liberation for everyone when you see everyone as you. 

You also begin to see that world peace is not naïve, only unrealized. It is a future we have not yet remembered our way into. But we will. Every act of individual healing, every choice to tell the truth, every moment of awareness that breaks a ancestral pattern or personal cycle—it all ripples out into the collective. The more of us who walk through the world remembering who we are, the more inevitable that world becomes.

In my view, that’s pretty much the whole point.