Stop Seeking Now
Monday, August 20th, 2007My brother used to call me the “searcher seeker.” This label could be applied to most people on a spiritual path. We spend a lot of time desperately seeking something even if we aren’t quite sure what that something is.
Judging from the world’s many spiritual autobiographies, the searcher seeker isn’t a uniquely Western phenomenon. It’s an expression of how human beings start to wake up. But what happens when the searcher seeker comes from a particularly aggressive, materialistic culture in which never-ending growth is the predominant value?
The seeking never stops.
Seeking “bigger, better, and more” is a national, cultural disease in the U.S. We’re always trading up, moving forward, climbing the ladder, expanding, and acquiring. No one is happy without a plan to get more, or be more in the future. If we’ve given up on ourselves, we expect our kids to carry on the More tradition. We’ve even got a new profession, the life coach, to help people succeed on the More path.
What is the result of this endless, compulsive seeking and searching? Anxiety. Misery. Depression. Aggression. Anger. Competitiveness. Jealousy.
Why? Because we are so compelled to seek more, we have lost the ability to recognize enough. We have literally lost touch with the feeling of fulfillment.
Applied to spiritual practitioners, this means that many Westerners, and particularly North Americans, find it difficult, if not impossible, to recognize when they have met an appropriate teacher, to stick with that teacher, and to relax and take refuge in the teachings. We may fleetingly feel the compassion of the teacher and the wisdom of the teachings. We may even talk as if our teacher and the teachings are the best, the highest, and so on, thereby pumping ourselves up to think we have finally arrived. But we cannot stop the momentum of seeking, and so we cannot fully relax and be truly nourished by our present situation.
We are like people at a party. Our gaze obsessively darts around the room and never focuses on the conversation at hand. We are constantly looking past the teacher and the teachings, and our own practice. We move around between one teacher and another, and one tradition and another. We go to one teacher and ask what they think about the teachings of another teacher so we can sit back and judge, masking with cleverness our own lonely feelings of separation. We collect initiations and empowerments. We console ourselves with the lists of teachings we have attended by famous teachers and brag, using the names of our teachers as spiritual status trading cards.
We never complete one practice before we are on to the next one, or we mix and match practices from different teachers because we have to have it all, like a bagel with everything.
When I first came into a conscious relationship with my Guru, I knew beyond any ordinary analysis or thinking that there was no more need to seek. Yet, for a long time, the habit of seeking continued. And an echo is still there, like the rush of speed in my ear that won’t entirely go away.
At the same time, the profound relaxation that derives from recognizing Guru and taking refuge in that supreme Self and its wisdom has taught me in a short while what lifetimes of compulsive seeking could not.
Gaining back the memory and taste of fulfillment is a crucial moment in any person’s unfoldment. Deep surrender and the supreme offering (yajna) of Self to Self, emerges only from this.
Of course, not every person who goes from teacher to teacher, or from tradition to tradition, is doing so compulsively or out of fear. But these “honey bee yogins” are a more rare phenomenon than you might think. Most of us do not have the capacity to draw nourishment in this way. In attempting to do so, we create a paradoxical situation of excess that is driving us to starvation.
Only when we are more familiar with fulfillment can studying with multiple teachers, or in multiple traditions truly feed us. We must have already recognized, through practice and transmission, the essence and various textures of the Reality that are the View, method, and fruit of authentic teachings. At this point, we understand in an embodied way that there is only one Guru and one teaching. So we can delight in the incredibly diverse expressions of this and become further established in Reality without distraction.
Please be warned, though, that to discover this capacity is not a spiritual career goal. Only recognizing your real situation in this moment and relaxing into open presence through practice and transmission will prepare you for the inevitability of Self-realization. This inevitability is a river, not a ladder or a supermarket. The river is the nourishing, compassionate flow of life. Relax and slow down so you can slowly learn to recognize nourishment and fulfillment. Eventually you will discover there is nothing to seek: you have been a child of the river all along.
In Matriseva,
Shambhavi
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