Spiritual Ambition and What Is Already Here
La ambición espiritual y lo que ya está aquí
A student asks whether the drive and ambition they feel toward spiritual realization is genuine or whether it is a distraction, and the teacher explores the difference between a love for truth and a misguided pursuit of something imagined to be missing.
Spiritual Ambition and What Is Already Here
A student asks whether the drive and ambition they feel toward spiritual realization is genuine or whether it is a distraction, and the teacher explores the difference between a love for truth and a misguided pursuit of something imagined to be missing.
When you were talking about spiritual ambition, I definitely feel that energy in me. I think it's pure, but I also recognize that it's an energy that isn't content with where it is. It keeps pulling me. This whole process is so confusing, because everything you say, all the non-dual teachings, it makes sense. I can grasp it. But it also feels like it escapes me, because this ambitiousness arises and I'm not sure: is it leading me somewhere, or is it just blocking me? Is it distracting me?
That's another one that's a bit hard, but in general I would recommend channeling ambition toward worldly affairs.
What I call "spiritual" is just a tool to point to something different from what we know as normal reality. When normal reality is misunderstood and not seen for what it is, it loses something. Then we need to come up with a name for that which is lost. But it's lost only through a misunderstanding, a misperception. And what's lost we can call spiritual.
But once true spirituality is seen, it almost disappears, because everything is that. What is worldly and ordinary is also extraordinary and spiritual. There's no difference.
Ambition for what you already have
So to have ambition for the spiritual is most likely confusion, because it's an imagination of what is spiritual. What I'm pointing to, at least, is already here. It is the nature of this. The ambition you might have is for something you can't get, because you already have it. You can only get what you're imagining you don't have, which is something different.
I'm also being careful here, because there could be a drive, a love, a passion to discover this because you've tasted it, you've glimpsed it. And that's valid. We've had this conversation quite a few times, around the baby and the bathwater. I think something similar may be at play here. There is a drive that is a true love for this, for discovering it, for knowing it. And maybe there's also something that is an older patterning.
Checking what the ambition is for
I would just say: check what the ambition is for. What is it aiming toward? If it's toward some kind of experience in the future, or something that would give you a quality that is in some way special, those are things I would qualify as distractions, as a misunderstanding. A very natural, normal misunderstanding. We can only start this work through misunderstanding. We come from a misunderstanding and move toward a truer understanding. It's a process of clearing away the misinterpretations.
The baby, metaphorically, is the love for that which is actually true and real, which is what you're looking for. That love can get distilled through understanding, and the distillation brings it here. It can only be here. So: what is this? Who am I, here, now?
It's not about either of us becoming more special in any way, or having any particular experience that we imagine, or one we've had in the past and want to repeat. But those experiences do help in that they become tastes, and those tastes often do awaken an ambition. Through a process of deeper understanding, that ambition subsides toward a knowing of this, in this moment.
That's why I often recommend channeling that big drive and ambition into worldly affairs, just to avoid the risk of driving toward something that simply isn't here.
I feel like it really is from the heart. It feels like a deep ambition toward love and safety. But I don't feel that fullness when I just look. And I'm also concerned that if I put my ambitions toward worldly matters (because I do have a lot of healthy, action-oriented energy naturally), I'll get distracted.
The ordinary and the extraordinary are not separate
You can only get distracted if you again misunderstand the worldly. If we make the worldly only ordinary, then we're misinterpreting. One could have a project that's purely for profit, where the number one objective is profit, and that can still be spiritual. It matters how we bring our understanding to it, our level of love and ethics and creativity.
It's really about the union of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the worldly and the spiritual, to the point where you cannot imagine them to be different or separate.
Safety and love as already existing
Your ambition for love and safety: I would commend that energy. But I would direct it toward realizing that safety can only be discovered as already existing. I'm not talking about danger in the sense that your house is being broken into right now. That kind of safety, sure, there are drives that have to do with addressing that. But the safety you're talking about is much more of an intrinsic, subjective nature. The sense of lacking safety, the sense of lacking love, arises now, through a misunderstanding, through a misinterpretation of what you think you are.
I know that these words aren't going to land as, "Yes, I know I think I'm this thing and I'm not this thing." It's a lot more hidden than that.
You're saying you don't experience this kind of expansion or fullness. So in everything you do in order to know the love and safety you're looking for, just always keep in mind that it's already here. Sure, you could travel around the world, do psychedelics, go to retreats. All of that can help. But it helps only if it uncovers a knowing of something that's already here. It's only helpful if it dispels the illusion of it being missing. In that way, chipping away, chipping away.
Knowledge.
The cost of defining what you are
Yes, but it's the knowledge of intellectual knowing: "I have decided I know what I am." When we define ourselves to be something we know, we lose what we truly are. There's a gain and a loss. The gain is, "I know what I am, wonderful." But there's the loss of what we truly are, and that loss hurts.
Then, because we're attached to this knowing of what I am, we interpret the hurt as something we can do something about. "I know what it is. I'll figure it out. I'll do something about it." Until all of that striving and trying fails so badly that we get so tired we say, "Maybe I can't do something about it. What is this about? What is the source of this?"
It really starts to feel like, "I am the problem. The source is me." And that's where we start to look in the right place. That's what it has to do with the illusions of "I."