The Ambition That Already Has What It Seeks
La ambición que ya tiene lo que busca
A student explores the tension between spiritual ambition and the teaching that what is sought is already present, raising questions about whether this driven energy is a help or a hindrance.
The Ambition That Already Has What It Seeks
A student explores the tension between spiritual ambition and the teaching that what is sought is already present, raising questions about whether this driven energy is a help or a hindrance.
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's not content with where it is. It keeps pulling me. This whole process is so confusing, because everything you say and all the non-dual teachings make 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 blocking me, or is it distracting me?
That's another one that's a bit hard, but I would in general 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. 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 is already here
So to have ambition for the spiritual is most likely confusion, because it's an imagination of what "spiritual" means. What I'm pointing to, at least, is already here. It is the nature of this. The ambition you might have cannot get you what you're after, 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 and 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. Maybe there's something similar here: 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 the aim
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, or as a misunderstanding. A very natural, normal misunderstanding. We can only start this work through misunderstanding. We come from a misunderstanding and go toward a truer understanding. So it's a process of clearing away the misinterpretations.
The baby, metaphorically speaking, is the love for that which is actually true and real, for what you're really looking for. That love can get distilled through understanding, and that 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 particular experiences that we imagine, or that we've had in the past and want to repeat. But those experiences do help in that they become tastes that often awaken an ambition. Through a process of deeper understanding, that ambition subsides toward the knowing of this, in this moment. That's why I often recommend channeling the big drive and ambition into worldly affairs, just to avoid the risk of driving toward something that's simply not 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 worldly and the spiritual are not separate
You can only get distracted if you again misunderstand the worldly. In the same way, if we make the worldly only ordinary, we're misinterpreting. One could have a project that is 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, 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 it to be any different, cannot imagine it to be separate.
So your ambition for love and safety: I would commend that energy, but direct it toward realizing that safety can only be discovered as already existing. I'm not talking about danger, as if your house is being broken into right now. That kind of safety, sure, there are drives that address that. But the safety you're talking about is of a much more intrinsic, subjective nature. The sense of a lack of safety, the sense of a lack of love, arises now, through a misunderstanding, through a misinterpretation of what you think you are.
Already here
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 expansion or fullness. So 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. And in that way, chipping away, chipping away.
I think when I go into the "I am" state, I get what you mean when you say there is no center, there is no subject-object, it's the same field. I feel that and I understand the pointing. When you stop and think about it: yes, these are just thoughts in my head, these are just illusions, there is no inside and outside. But even when I go to that space or orient myself to that higher truth, it just feels like me still.
Look at dissatisfaction, not for satisfaction
That doesn't matter. What matters is the sense that something is missing, the dissatisfaction. We don't get clarified by trying to add satisfaction, by adding love. It's by looking at the sense of dissatisfaction, the sense of something missing, the sense of a lack of love, the sense of a lack of safety. Whatever it is that in your experience feels like something's just not right, something is missing, this isn't okay. Whatever expression you would use for it, that's where you want to look. Get really close and intimate with it. Let that be your guide and your teacher, in a sense. The understanding of what that is, only you can discover.
What I'm offering is a pointing in a direction. Because you could develop powers, spiritual powers. They are real. And that could get you things that are real. But it would only take you further away from what I think is much better, which is what I could call freedom, peace, liberation, well-being. I'm not saying don't develop powers; often they are developed as a byproduct of this work. But not because they are the objective.
The feeling that something is wrong
I'm not too concerned about powers. But the thing you said about "there's something wrong," that has been running in my head pretty much since I started meditating. It's like something about my life doesn't make sense. Everyone else is on a different level. I've been forgotten, or there's something that doesn't add up about my life. Then the mind comes in and wants to figure it out. But I feel like that's a core trap, or judgment, or something that just keeps continuing. It gets fed to me whenever something doesn't work out the way I want, or something doesn't make sense.