The Final Non-Duality 6 – The Fulfillment of the Religious Quest: Eternal Structure and the Destiny of Thought

Beyond Paths, Beyond Goals — The Joy That Always Already Is

Across the millennia, religion has been the most enduring expression of humanity’s longing for the infinite. Beneath its doctrines, rituals, and images, there pulses a single, unyielding question: What is the origin of all things, and what is our place within it? This question, which no civilization has ever avoided, is not born from ignorance, but from the inescapable necessity of truth seeking itself — a movement not in time, but in the unfolding of what eternally is.

Religion is not falsehood. It is not mere myth, nor the childhood of humanity. It is the preparation for truth — a veil that both hides and reveals, a symbol that both points and obscures. As we have seen, every tradition — Buddhist, Christian, Vedantic, modern non-dual — contains within itself a glimpse of the eternal, and yet also a contradiction: the belief in becoming, in movement, in a passage from absence to presence.

But these contradictions are not failures. They are necessary stages in the historical and spiritual unfolding of truth. As Emanuele Severino has shown, the entire edifice of human thought has been governed by a single, unchallenged presupposition: that Being can come to be and pass away — that what is can also not be. This is the root of every idea of salvation, transformation, awakening. It is the core of the contraddizione C that underlies the religious quest.

And yet, even this contradiction is not outside the truth. It, too, appears — and because it appears, it belongs eternally to the structure of Being. Religion, then, is not something to be rejected or deconstructed. It is something to be fulfilled — not by replacing its symbols with new ones, but by recognizing what they have always pointed toward: the eternal, necessary, unchangeable structure of Being.

The recognition of this structure does not invalidate religion. It completes it. The longing for union with God, the yearning to escape suffering, the search for enlightenment — all of these find their resolution not in future attainment, but in the present appearing of what has never been absent. The soul does not need to journey toward God, because it has never been separate. The Self does not need to awaken, because it has never been asleep. Being does not need to become — because it is.

And in this recognition, a new dimension opens — not a new doctrine, but the end of doctrine. Not a new path, but the falling away of all paths. What remains is not emptiness, but fullness: the eternal appearing of every being in its necessity, the impossibility of loss, and the boundless joy that flows from this seeing. This is not an idea, not a belief, but the unavoidable ground of all appearing. It is not something we reach; it is that which allows anything to appear at all.

Thus, the religious quest does not vanish — it is transfigured. Its images, its names, its prayers, its silences, all remain — but now no longer as means to an end. They are seen as eternal gestures within the infinite joy of Being, not steps toward a goal that lies elsewhere.

In this light, even longing itself is no longer a sign of lack, but a manifestation of glory. Not the glory of a god beyond the world, but of the eternal truth that nothing is ever truly absent. Every step of history, every teaching, every contradiction — all are gathered into this one truth: that what-is, is. And nothing can be taken from it.

This is the fulfillment of religion — not its overcoming, but its homecoming. Not the collapse of faith, but its foundation finally made clear. A new spiritual understanding is dawning, not because something new has appeared, but because the eternal has finally come to recognize itself.

And in that recognition — beyond paths, beyond goals, beyond becoming — there is only joy.