The Homecoming
The spiritual search is not an ascent but a return
The FASO Way newsletter — exploring how to thrive as an artist in the age of AI
Today, we have a post today by Shiv Sengupta, the man and the mind behind the publication Dark Dawn.
Shiv is the Author of the Advaitaholics Anonymous series of books. His avant-garde, no-nonsense approach to the existential questions of life has captured the minds of readers across the globe. With a balance of caustic wit and profound insight, his writing throws down the gauntlet for each person to confront reality by themselves, without the assurances of authority figures, the dictates of dogma and the comfort of cultural belief systems.
Clint’s note: Shiv is one of the few writers whom I carefully read every single essay he posts and I believe today’s essay has great value for people from all walks of life but, especially, for those of us pursuing creativity and the truth of the self, which, in the end, are the same pursuit.
I highly recommend you subscribe directly to Shiv’s newsletter Dark Dawn:
To prevent duplicate content issues, this article will be locked in two days for paying members only. After that point you may read this article on Shiv’s Substack site here (if you are a paid subscriber of Dark Dawn)
Feature Article:
The Homecoming
“Your recent essays have left me with a question I can’t seem to shake.
You often point back to the ordinary — going to work, raising children, paying bills — as though these aren’t distractions from truth but expressions of it.
But if that’s the case, why does ordinary life so often feel... flat?
Why does my mind keep searching for something more profound, more spiritual, more meaningful, if reality is supposedly already complete as it is?
Is the search itself part of the problem, or is there something genuine that it is trying to discover?”
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***
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The search isn’t a problem. You seek because you are haunted by an unshakeable memory of what it was like.
A memory that lives not as an idea or an image - but more as a feeling that resides deep within your bones. That feeling of what ‘home’ felt like. When home was not just the four walls around you but being itself. When the divine was as much a reality as the mundane. When the sacred shone from within every seashell, from underneath rocks, in your mother’s laughter, even in the hurt you felt when your best friend moved away.
Your search is really a homecoming. And, I know - so many have pointed to the fact that home is where we already are and that there is nowhere to really go, because we’ve never really left. I’ve said it plenty too. But simply acknowledging that intellectually falls flat, doesn’t it? Because it’s not some physical place you are in search of. It’s that feeling of home. Of such existential safety and warmth, that you feel free to simply be as you are. Where you no longer need to be on your ‘best behaviour’. Where you don’t need to ensure whether others will like you or accept you because you are already unconditionally accepted.
That is what you are seeking, isn’t it? The freedom to be without needing to justify your own existence. To see unconditional love and acceptance reflected back to you. To know that even if monsters come looking for you - you will be held, you will be protected, you will be safe.
But how many adults truly feel that way? How many feel totally at home in this big, bad world?
No, this world doesn’t feel like home - it feels more like an orphanage. And we, its 8 billion occupants - children of this planet - were orphaned the moment that native connection was severed and we were cast into a world of abstraction.
There was a reason you paused to pick up stones when you were a child. Back then you could still feel into the spirit of things. Each stone had a unique spirit - and you knew this even if you couldn’t express it in words. That is why it was worth putting it in your pocket. You knew there was no other stone like it in the whole world. And when you jumped in a puddle - you were very careful to pay attention to what the puddle said to you. Each puddle said something different - often something uniquely hilarious - which is why you laughed so loudly each time. Jumping in puddles was like going to a standup comedy show.
Trees were worthy of love. Frogs were worthy of friendship. Clouds were worthy of admiration. A simple piece of paper was worthy of your greatest masterpiece.
That was the world you once lived in. It was a sacred world. Sacred - because you could feel the spirit of all that you encountered. There was never a rush to get anywhere, because rushing would mean losing out.
Yet, the grownups around you seemed differently oriented. They seemed to live in a different kind of world. When you showed them the rocks you had collected, you were introducing them to your new friends, but they smiled distractedly and said condescending things like,
“Very nice, honey!”
That’s when you realized, that they lived in a different world than you did. They lived in the world of things - but not the spirit of things.
And even in your little child mind - you mused on what it would be like if the rocks in your pocket were no longer alive. If they no longer had personalities. If they no longer spoke to you. What must it be like to live in a dead world?
What you didn’t quite realize, at the time, was that you were being prepared to inhabit just such a world. As you grew older - the adults, the schools, the sports organizations, the systems that supported you - incentivized one thing and one thing only. The knowledge of the world of things.
Your perception into the spirit of things was altogether ignored. You were even punished for it. When the mathematics teacher was drilling you with your timetables - you noticed the little ant who had ventured onto your desk and was tentatively seeking a place of shelter, and you gently allowed him to climb onto your hand. But that moment of friendship was labelled ‘a distraction’ by your teacher and you were sent to the principal’s office for it.
You were constantly told you needed to ‘smarten up’ and to ‘learn the way the real world works’ and this confused you. Because you had always known how the world worked and had never once doubted it. Except the world you knew so well was that of the spirit of things. This ‘real world’ the grownups kept talking about was the dead one - the world of things. And from your vantage point there was very little that was real about it. It seemed mostly like grownup make-believe.
Yet, as the years wore on, and the more you were incentivized by those around you - your parents, your teachers, your peers, your professors, your bosses, your mentors, your leaders - the more you came to inhabit the world of things, and the more you lost your connection to the spirit of things.
Rocks became inanimate objects. Frogs became noisy amphibians. Shells became things you could cut your feet on if you weren’t careful.
Intimacy. Connection. Relationship. These became unnecessary. Even redundant.
In the world of things only one thing mattered. Accumulation. The capacity to trade. The more you had, the more opportunities you created to have more.
Value was not something inherent but something manufactured and accrued.
Even human relationships became a mechanism to leverage power and access.
Whereas once your pockets could only hold a few stones - now you could fill your cupboards with them. And not just any stones. Precious ones that you couldn’t just find in a forest but that miners in faraway lands would have to dig deep into the earth to retrieve. You even displayed a few of these stones on your finger - or on the face of your new watch.
But no matter how many you accumulated. Not a single one spoke to you.
That world of dead things that the grownups in your life once seemed to inhabit is where you found yourself now.
How can one feel alive when surrounded with dead things? When the people we meet are more stone-like than the stones that we once carried in our pockets? When every creature, every event, every person, every experience is turned into an object, then a commodity?
When your house feels less like a home and more like a mausoleum? When social introductions sound more like eulogies? When even your desire to connect with something deeper is outsourced to religious institutions and middlemen that translate the spirit of things into the language of objects - another goal to be achieved, another transaction to be brokered.
You wonder why ordinary life feels so flat. It is not life but your perspective that has been flattened.
You began the spiritual search thinking you are seeking something extraordinary, metaphysical, divine, even supernatural. But you are not.
That is just what the world of the spirit of things looks like from the limited imagination of a flattened mind. To a mind that has yet to be flattened - the ordinary is extraordinary, the physical is interwoven with the metaphysical, the divine radiates from the mundane, and the supernatural is as natural as any other phenomenon.
This is why seeking rarely leads to finding. You cannot find what was never lost. But you can remember what was forgotten.
That existential discomfort you feel is a necessary catalyst.
Nisargadatta once said, “The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses it.”
The abyss is the chasm that exists between the world of things and that of the spirit of things. An abyss that has been created by our capacity for abstracting our own existence.
The feeling of flatness, of meaninglessness you feel is evidence that you have entered into that abyss and are fully inhabiting it. And the truth is - there is no going back. The heart is crossing the abyss. The homecoming has begun.
Odysseus is called home to Ithaca. But that does not mean the journey is an easy one.
Because the world will not understand your journey. It will still demand of you. It will still transact with you. It will still punish you when you fail to show up.
Circe, the Sirens, Cyclops, Poseidon - each will come to you in their various forms to seduce or terrify you. In the feelings of being unworthy, of being left behind, of not living up to your potential, of worrying that the world is falling apart - or alternatively in the sense of superiority, of achievement, of ‘finally making it’, of being better than.
Each fear or lust will whisper in your ear, “return to the world of things and give up this childish fantasy of home”. It will tell you you are being distracted. That you have important things to do. You have impacts to make. You have better things to do with your time.
It will call you foolish, self-centered, lazy, unambitious, unworthy, a fraud, weak, a drain on society.
These - and not supernatural monsters - are the ones you must face. For you will recognize in them the very voices that flattened you in the first place. The very fears that stole you away from the spirit of things and set up your residence in the world of things.
They are the same voices that coerce you to stay - through fear, guilt, rage, shame, sympathy, or promises of glory, power, and reward.
And be sure the rewards will come - when the punishments cease to work. Praise from others, the validation you have always been seeking, power, influence, fame, prestige, wealth, sexual attraction - it will all come. The Sirens’ songs are so beautiful and haunting that even the most stalwart are forced to pause and are drawn to lay down and slumber.
It is not your will that will overcome these. It is the memory of home that still lives within your bones. That memory is so powerful that it will not let you rest.
You must have faith in the spirit of things. In its power to draw you homeward, no matter what obstacles stand in the way.
Don’t be in a rush to arrive either. Because ‘rushing’ belongs to the world of things. To that world where objects assume a hierarchy of importance. And time is how we assign that importance. But in the spirit of things there can be no rushing - because there is no importance. There is no hierarchy.
The spirit of a stone is on par with the spirit of a saint. It is all the same spirit.
There is no time in that world. There is only this single eternal instant. You must learn to recognize this instant and what it feels like to inhabit it - or how else will you recognize when you have reached the shores of home?
Most crucially, don’t expect home to look like a happy place. Don’t expect it to look like a place of eternal sunshine, or a place where pain and suffering never visit. If you want to live in such places - then I suggest you succumb to the songs of those Sirens. They will lull you into any kind of dream that you want.
Home will look just like any other place. Messy at times. Ordinary. In need of repair. But it is not its appearance that makes it home. It is not the things within it that will look any different.
It is that those things are no longer just things.
They are alive.
They witness. They listen. They speak.
A world in which you no longer live in isolation talking to yourself.
But one in which everything exists in perpetual conversation.
PS — As I said at the top of this issue, I highly recommend you subscribe directly to Shiv’s newsletter, Dark Dawn.
PPS — This article explores, in its own way, the mystery of Art—we must learn, as artists, to see the aliveness of reality and there, we find Truth revealed. We must find, in short, our way home and perhaps, just perhaps, if we craft our art carefully and truthfully, we can show others, also, the way home.
One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.
Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.
But that is the how.
The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.
So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.
If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.
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Well done. I am taken by these words about that magical place we left. It was so fun. Many things to be engaged with. And when the light of fireflies flash to that place, the sweetness smacks you. Yes, smacks you back for an instant. Thanks.