Seeking and Finding
Buscar y Encontrar
A question about the nature of seeking, whether there is anything to do on the spiritual path, and what it means to see that what seemed real is actually thought.
Seeking and Finding
A question about the nature of seeking, whether there is anything to do on the spiritual path, and what it means to see that what seemed real is actually thought.
I want to clarify a concept around seeking. I understand mentally that what is, is, and there's nothing I can do to see the truth of what is. Whatever I do, the truths of life are what everyone is already saying, so it doesn't matter what I do. In that sense, seeking is irrelevant.
I don't think I normally use the word "seeking," but obviously it comes up because it's useful in this work. If you ask me this next week or in two weeks, I would probably say something completely different. I don't have a fixed definition for it. But what I would say is: seeking is any kind of energy that moves into thought, looking for what will fulfill you.
The same lack, different arenas
What usually happens is people try to satisfy a sense of lack in life through work, relationships, money, and so on. But it's the same in spirituality. There isn't much difference. The big difference is that if you're trying to satisfy that sense of lack through some kind of spiritual teaching, you're more likely to get at the root of it. But you can get just as lost in spirituality as in materialism.
In contemporary spiritual circles, "seeking" is used more specifically in the spiritual sense, but I don't see a big difference between seeking in the materialist, worldly sense and seeking in the spiritual sense.
There is something you can do
When you say there's nothing you can do, that's not correct. I would push back on that. There is a way of seeing by looking, and it can be clarified. What you could look at is: that which appears as thought, does it seem to be more real than thought? The complexity of that can be broken down. There are stages and different approaches. The Buddhist approach, for example, is very methodical, with many techniques and pointings. But it's all about seeing how thought appears to be more than thought. That something feels more real than it is can be looked at.
But the seeing is also just thought.
The seeing is not thought. What sees is not a thought. This is very tricky to speak to semantically, because everything I say is going to point to more thoughts. But that which sees is not the thought. The seeing that something is empty is itself prior to thought. That which sees can see that something seemed to be real and then it is recognized to be a thought in some form.
No self, no time, no other place
Take time, for example. In Buddhism, they speak of anatta, no self. You hear this a lot now in Advaita as well; there's a crossover of different ways of teaching. To see that everything I can call "myself" is a thought: that is anatta. That's where they say there is no self, because there isn't anything I can find that is truly self. It's the same with time. If you see that anything you can know as time only exists in the mind as thought, then what are you going to seek for? How are you going to seek? If there is no place other than this, no thing other than this, no other time other than this.
When seeking stops
Seeking stops when that is seen very clearly. All kinds of seeking stop. But you can still live within what this life is. There is still experience. There can still be pursuit and enjoyment, but it's a different way of living. It's hard to describe the difference, but it is freedom. Freedom within the relative.
That's where seeking ends. And what do you find? Many teachers point to the value of stopping, of dropping the search. I say instead: just look in the right place. Keep seeking, but direct the energy toward clarifying what is real and what is thought.
What seemed to be reality is interpretation
Now, everything is real. Everything is reality. The problem is what I confuse to be something that it is not. I confuse my thoughts to be a self. The distinction is: what used to seem like self is now recognized as thoughts. They are completely different in nature. When I think I understand this reality, when I have a map of it, and then I realize that what I took reality to be is just thoughts, just interpretation, not how reality actually is: that I define as finding.
You realize that what seemed to be reality is thought, an interpretation. This can be seen so deeply that there is nothing that can define self, nothing that can define reality, and it becomes extremely obvious. There is no confusion about it. But there are different degrees. You can see more and more deeply, and that can be mapped out in stages of awakening.