The End of Seeking

If you are like me, or any other typical spiritual seeker, you have probably felt frustration along this seeming path to spiritual awakening, wondering when, if ever, you will spiritually awaken. What underlies such frustration is an unexamined assumption, which is that there is some state of mind or heart, some cosmic experience, that has thus far eluded us, that if we would only assiduously follow some particular path or discipline, we would be rewarded with such a breakthrough. This is tantamount to finding “the light at the end of the tunnel, ” an assumption that what we are seeking is apart from us, separated by time and space.

The way the surface (or ego) mind operates has us dependent upon principles of materiality and it is through this lens we conclude that what we yearn for is clearly not here, not now. We are looking for an objective experience. And we’ve heard all the dramatic stories of spiritual realization, the mystical happenings such as déjà vu moments, seeing apparitions, telepathic communications, even beholding divine beings. I had a friend who began having regular nightly visits from Jesus standing at the foot of his bed, and wondered if he was now closer to spiritual awakening. That was many years ago, and this man is still a seeker. Maybe you are too? I was too until very recently.

The seeming difficulty and the rarity of spiritual awakening or realization is oxymoronic. That is, it is the extreme simplicity of spiritual reality, it's objectless, spaceless, timeless presence that eludes our normal perceptual way of noticing. We look out from a sense of being a separate self, a separate subject looking for an external object. In this dualistic mode, we cannot perceive what is not apart from us at any distance. Remember Jesus correcting his disciples when they asked when the “kingdom of God would come” he told them it “would not come with observation” rather it was already “before them” and “within them.” What they were seeking the Father had already given them. Even in prayer, he reminded them to pray “believing that you have already received… and it would be theirs.”

Until we sincerely ask and penetrate into the question, what is already and always present? Truth eludes us. While we are in the midst of seeking, we are essentially practicing “the absence” rather than the “presence.” In every experience regardless of the content, there is a simultaneous element that is overlooked, and that is awareness or knowing. Without the presence of awareness (or consciousness), there can be no perception; no experience is possible. Awareness is prior to, and thus most primary and fundamental to reality. As St. Francis is quoted as saying, “What’s looking is what you are looking for.”

Because we are so conditioned to material reality, we assume that whatever God is, or what we are, must be of some form that can be seen, and described with definable, observable qualities. But such observables are only the evidence within perception, the content of experience, not the pure capacity for knowing itself. This recognition eludes us because it is “closer than breath.” In order to bring knowing forward, we must become aware of awareness itself. This is why Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son, who at the end of his suffering and seeking journey, turned around. His external search came to an end, and he found what he was searching for was waiting for him at home. And so it is with each of us. Our searching and seeking for enlightenment outside of ourselves will only end in frustration and are destined to fail.

When we turn the light of knowing away from the objects of experience towards its own essence, awareness itself, all that has obscured our true nature is seen through and the very peace and happiness that it previously sought in objective experience is made plain.

This is such a huge paradigm shift in understanding the source of our well-being. Until this Truth becomes fully realized our mind spins a maelstrom of thinking, strategizing, hoping, and praying for some better day when we will be graced with happiness. Now that we realize that happiness is at the very heart of our being, we see it no longer as something to be acquired, but to be revealed.

In deference to the truth and full disclosure, it can be asserted that all of our many practices and disciplines toward spiritual realization are not necessary, except in conceding to the separate self’s story of what is missing, or broken in our experience, these practices may eventually wear away the obscuration of the Truth that what we are looking for is here within us, as it has been all along.

Namaste,

Rev. Larry