Since ancient times, reflective (indeed, highly sensitised) individuals have realised that the true pilgrim’s journey ends with two truth (or trueness) experiences.1,2 Her actual, particular pilgrimage ends with the attainment or realization of her particular goal, and which she experiences as one aspect or the whole of her True Self. But that True Self is relative, that is to say, it’s the experience of a relational reality, which is, however, rewarded with a massive rush of joyous rapture (i.e. for being completed and not for its shape).
However, if at the moment of the achievement of her goal, that is to say, of self-realization, she looks (i.e. experiences) laterally, in other words, if she stands back and looks at her whole (i.e. universal) situation, she will also realize that her True Self is merely a relativized (or particularised) making real of a universal drive (or urge) to attain differentiated (hence self) realization, indeed, that she is merely the local (or particular) means to that universal drive to creating a real identity.
In short, if and when a pilgrim achieves her True Self as a reality, she provides a real self for an urge or drive that does not have an actual reality (but merely a potential to realness) or an identity (i.e. an identifiable difference). At the moment she makes her True Self real, she ‘is’ (therefore is not different from) - and may experience herself as - that universal urge (so to speak in situ).
In religious (spiritist, rather than spiritual) terms, if the universal urge to create a real identity is called ‘God’ (and many names have been invented for it), then at the moment she attains her true (and real Self) she ‘is’ (stopped, here and now, momentarily) as a particular expression (i.e. as an identifiable realization) of that God, and therefore ‘is’ God (particularised, hence relativised yet absolute). That experience, and which is the supreme experience of the mystic, pays off in an almighty rush of joyous rapture (and thanksgiving) … for absolute homecoming.
The creators of the earliest Upanishads in India expressed their (secondary knowledge) understanding (or experience, denoting primary knowledge) with the aphorism ‘Tat tvam asi’ meaning ‘That thou art’. The creators of the Book of Exodus in the OT expressed the same understanding/experience as ‘Yahweh’, to wit, ‘I am that I am’.
The ultimate goal of the true pilgrim is to achieve the ultimate experience (i.e. of the absolute becoming an identifiable reality) for which the relative experience of a real identity is merely the means. In other words, to get the ultimate experience (i.e. realness prior to identity) she must first produce a particular True Self. Then she has to sacrifice her particular True Self with an act of touch/contact, leaving her with a sense of universal (or absolute) realness prior to identity/difference.
1.
In this regard, read
Jnanagarbha ‘On the Two Truths’, or at least one of the many volumes written by
Vedantists on non-duality, or the Synoptic Gospels.
2.
The Two Truths issue has recently resurfaced in
Fundamental Physics with the ‘discovery’ of the Relativity and Quantum
theories.
Gospelss.