The contemplatives are clear that whatever they have arrived at is not new territory. The recognition is always: this was already here. The home was always the home. The seeking was real, but what the seeker found was not a destination, it was the ground that had been holding the seeking up.
Plotinus calls it epistrophe, the return. The soul descends from the One, and the work of a life is the slow turning back. Eckhart preaches the same gesture: the ground does not have to be reached; it has to be recognized. The Sufi path, for all its talk of journey, is finally a coming-home.
The Lakota prayer mitakuye oyasin is the same recognition stated as a relation. All my relations. The sky father, the earth mother, the four-leggeds, the rooted ones, the stones. To say it is to remember that the human had never been separate; the separation was a story the human was telling itself.
This is the theme that holds the others. The ground is what we are. The self is what looks. The veil is the seeker’s grasping. The practice is what wears the grasping down. The ego death is what falls away. And the return is what is left, which turns out to have been the whole thing, all along.