The Wall at the End of Seeking
What You Are Looking For Is Already Here
October 11, 2023
dialogue

The Wall at the End of Seeking

El muro al final de la búsqueda

A student describes reaching a point where the drive to seek, both in love and in spiritual inquiry, has collapsed into a kind of hopelessness, and the teacher reframes this loss of hope as the falling away of an escape mechanism.

The Wall at the End of Seeking

A student describes reaching a point where the drive to seek, both in love and in spiritual inquiry, has collapsed into a kind of hopelessness, and the teacher reframes this loss of hope as the falling away of an escape mechanism.

That whole conversation got me in tears. I don't know where to start. I think I feel that I have wanted, for so long, mainly two things: love and freedom, with an idea of what love and freedom are. The right relationship to grow with, or freedom in the sense of this work, realizing my true nature. But I feel like I've reached a point where it's the opposite. I no longer have anything to seek, because finally, when I approach what feels like opening my heart, I'm so scared. It's as if, in the past little while, I had touched something and then realized: no, I really don't want that.

What do you mean you don't want it?

It's as if I lost hope. I feel like I lost hope on everything. But in a sense, it's in a good way. It's not that nothing makes sense. It's that nothing is what I thought it was.

And there is also this other part. In the self-inquiry process, for the first time there is this sense that there really is something I cannot know. You know the movie The Truman Show? He sails and sails and sails until he gets to the end of it, and there is a wall, and he finds the door. I feel like I just found the wall. I go in circles, all of it circling around awareness, and how everything I ever perceive, phenomenally or not, is all through awareness. But the reality of what everything is made of is untouchable. There is no way I can reach it.

And it makes total sense, but then that's it. I feel like I lost hope there too. There is no getting there. So that's what I mean by losing hope. I don't know what to do now. The only thing I feel is to keep this heart open, but it seems like there isn't anything left to do. It's not about looking for the relationship. It's not about self-inquiry. There is nothing left that is doing.

The question is: what does the universe want as you, not want to do?

That's my whole point. Maybe I have always added that "to do."

Losing the escape mechanism

Yes. It's about creativity, not fixing. Because hope is about fixing. It's about time and the future and getting somewhere because something is broken or missing. Hope is, and this is a delicate thing to say because it's not applicable to every person at every moment, a toxic thing. What you are losing is the escape mechanism.

I get it. It's as if there was always something else to try, always something else to look for. And it's not about life and its infinite possibilities. It's about this "something else."

The wall is still seeking

Even when you're talking about awareness and you get into that looping thing where you can't touch it, where you hit the wall, still it's because you're trying to do something. You're trying to get somewhere. There's a hope that something will shift. But it's projected in time, and it literally is now. It's here now.

How is it possible that we know? I know there is something rather than nothing. We know the perfume of the beauty of it. Yet somehow it's as if I am fixated on saving someone.

The imagined someone

Exactly. Saving that someone you've created in your imagination.

Could I not?

It's up to you. You're free. And we do that because we find it beautiful.

This is the thing. For the longest time I thought it was because of all the suffering, but the reality is that it's out of beauty. It's so strange. I can't tell you that I'm suffering right now, but I do feel hopeless, stuck at that wall.

Trusting the unknowable

I think it's just a matter of trusting, taking time to trust more deeply. And to trust what? To trust the unknowable. The now. To trust your own knowing, your own recognition. You're in between two worlds.

It was very strange. All these years, you said before that it doesn't mean we don't have anything to do or that we cannot do anything. It's as if all that energy I've been putting in, I've been doing and doing: meditate, inquire, go here, go there. And it's as if I had landed in a desert.