Seeking Enlightenment

Now more than ever many people have added a new quest to their daily existence – “I want to be a Buddha” or I want to live spiritually. So they set about it, seeking spiritual guides and gurus, wearing “malas” and doing japas, finding new forms of meditation, reading every book on enlightenment and trying so hard to “love” everyone. Then they realize that their life has become even more miserable than when they were not spiritual.

Of course, this is how it is supposed to be. When you are on the spiritual path, your life is bound to get more difficult and exhausting, at least till you are finally liberated. If the path was not difficult you will not appreciate the beauty of the final recognition that you are a “no-thing”, that you have no center, that you are not an idea called “me”.

So seeking enlightenment is bound to make you suffer, it’s bound to frustrate you and it’s bound to exhaust you, provided you are really authentic and honest in your quest.

What do you find at end of seeking?

You don’t find anything, you don’t reach any state, you are not in possession of a new knowledge, you don’t become holy, you don’t create any new identities. The final liberation is when you find that you are not what you ever thought you were – that you are “nothing” itself, pure and simple to the core. You are not awareness, you are not consciousness, you are not soul, you are not god, you are simply nothing. But not a dead, empty, spiritless, boring nothing, but a rich, free and dancing nothing.

And then there is no doubt, there is no need for confirmation, there is no need to “do” anything to get somewhere, there is a final and complete liberation for this mind. Then you dance empty handed, and realize that you have always been dancing empty handed it’s just that now you know it. You have always been free, but until you realize it there is no freedom.

When the mind is liberated it does not seek “sanyas” or detachment. It becomes really playful and even mischievous. It has no problems anymore to deal with; it knows that it’s a servant to a higher power that you are. Now it does what it’s supposed to do, it plays, it creates, it enjoys and it relishes life in every way without any fear or bondage.

The truth of who you are, it’s so liberating and yet so powerful. It has a deep strength that you could never have imagined. This is the strength that propelled Jesus, this is the strength guided Ramana, this is the strength that enshrouded Siddhartha Buddha and yet it’s so ordinary and so fresh. It’s not “divinine” or holy, it’s just simply nothing. It’s as much in a piece of shit as it is in a pearl or a diamond. It’s as much “you” as it was Jesus or Ramana.

The Buddha was no different from who you are, and yet we worship him, we place him on a pedestal, we look at him as a divine figure and so we alienate him into a “god head”. So Buddha becomes a concept and a state that needs to be achieved.

And yet we are all “Buddhas” in our essence. It’s not something “big”, it’s just our true nature. We are all simply the nothing that is everything. And this is not an imagination but a simple reality, a scientific reality, a truth beyond ideas and concepts. But you have to realize this truth to know that it’s scientific, that it’s a fact, that it’s absolutely real, and that all your other ideas and concepts were unreal and imagined, but not the truth. Truth is not imagination, truth is reality.

Why do we seek enlightenment?

Because our nature wants to know itself. We are tired of our delusions and imaginations. We are tired of the endless tyranny of thoughts that the “unliberated” mind churns out. We are tired of moving like zombies everyday, begging for scraps of happiness from our circumstances. We are tired of seeking love and feeling cheated. We are tired of seeking money and feeling poor. We are tired of living everyday in fear.

We finally realize that this is not how we are supposed to live, that there is something within us that knows that the mind is in a wrong vision, we know intuitively that we are meant to be “free” and playful. We know this because we are “it”, we are freedom itself. Seeking enlightenment is the pull of your nature towards itself.

Once the seeking starts, it can only end in liberation. Till it ends, there will be suffering. Once it ends, you are free, and free forever. Nothing can ever touch this final realization. No ideas, no concepts, no arguments can ever take you away from your realization. You know you are finally home. This is the end of seeking and it’s an incredible relief.

When we seek enlightenment, we are constantly holding on to identities. We think we are awareness, we think we are consciousness, we think we are the “Now”, we think we are the Buddha, we think we are the space. We imagine all sorts of states, we imagine ourselves to be something, and it’s very exhausting, it’s very frustrating. And it finally ends when we run out of all our identities and the “me” finally dies to that fact that it never existed in the first place.

So keep seeking, keep exhausting yourself, keep running amok till you find that it’s all useless. You realize finally that you are already who you are, that you don’t have to “be” anything. That’s when the “me” jumps off the cliff and you become “centre less” the way you have eternally been, and then the mind starts dancing.

            *from Towards Life blog   http://www.towardslife.com

Nobody, NO-BODY - There

What you really want is to have a profound

experience of your own true nature.

At the deepest level, you are compelled to seek

out the true Source of "who" you really are.

The irony, though, is that when you seemingly

arrive at the very core of your Being, there will

be nobody there to greet you.

Who you think you are can't possibly survive

your own awakening.

Nobody can survive it

             - Chuck Hillig, "Seeds for the Soul",

                      Black Dot Publications 2003

Struggling, Striving, Thinking, Praying, . . . only distractions

Everything Comes Back to Nothing

Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For a reason you can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring, imagining, and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The world disappears. Everything disappears, and the person is like a pinpoint of light, just receding until it disappears. And there’s nobody there to witness it. The person is gone. Only, only awareness remains. Nothing else. No one to be aware. Nothing to be aware of. Only that remains itself. Then it’s understood, finally and simply.


Then everything—all the struggle, all the striving, all the thinking, all the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting go, all the grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging, all the cursing, too—was just a distraction. And only then is it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no more than a thought. With a single thought, the person seems to reemerge. With more thoughts, the world seems to reemerge right out of nothing. But now you know.


The incarnation is nothing more than a thought. A thousand incarnations are but a thousand thoughts. And this amazing miracle of a mirage we call the world reappears as it was before, but now you know. That’s why you usually have a good laugh, because you realize that all your struggles were made up. You conjured them up out of nothing—with a thought that was linked to another thought, that was then believed, that linked to another thought that was then believed. But never could it have been true, not for a second could it have actually existed. Not ever could you have actually suffered for a reason that was true—only through an imagination, good, bad, indifferent. The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness.


And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles seriously, just as I pretended to take my own seriously. You may pretend to take your own struggles seriously from time to time, and although we pretend, we really shouldn’t forget that we are pretending, that we are making up the content of our experience; we are making up the little dramas of our lives. We are making up whether we need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray to God or be purified or have karma cleansed—it’s all a thought. We just collude in this ridiculous charade of an illusion pretending that it’s real, only to reveal that it’s not. There is no karma. There is nothing really to purify. There’s no problem. There is only what you create and believe to be so. And if you like it that way, have at it!


But we cannot continue this absolute farce indefinitely. We cannot continue to pretend this game we play, indefinitely. It’s impossible. Everything comes back to nothing.


And then it’s a bit harder to hold a straight face consistently for the rest of your life.



          ~ A talk from Adyashanti
                      Transcribed from a talk in Pacific Grove, CA, June 9, 2006.
                                   
                                  http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=home

Dreaming Your Existence

Paramhansa Yogananda:

 "Give to God not only the good that you do, but also the bad. I do not mean that you should deliberately do things that are wrong. But when you cannot help yourself, because of habits that are too strong, tell your mind that God is performing those actions through you...

It is He, after all, who has dreamed your existence. You have merely hypnotized yourself with the thought of your weaknesses. If you make the Lord responsible for them, it will help you to break the false hold they have on your imagination. You'll find it easier, then, to recognize in yourself the perfect image of God."