The End of Seeking Redux II
Swept Into the Play of Compassion
As I was saying in the previous post, the principle of seeking implies that there remains something hidden from view. The very idea of seeking imposes (or assumes) a dualistic frame on the journey to an ‘enlightened state,’ as if there’s any journey at all, as if there’s something yet to be known, revealed, or altered about oneself. This framing ensures that we will feel separate from reality until that dilemma is resolved, as if we are the outside looking in. Andrew Holocek names (p.136) this condition of insufficiency or striving as a lack of transparency; we are less than transparent to ourselves and thus we gaze upon reality through a grimy window. As long as we feel stuck or separate or less than whole, that lack of transparency remains. That stuckness is not what keeps the grime on our windshield. It is the grime. We are the ones sustaining it. No one else can perform this trick of blinding ourselves to the truth of nature, our nature, sending us into seemingly interminable investigations, looking for the perfect streak-free window cleaner. But no matter what window cleaner we may use, if we continue to produce the grime, we are spinning our wheels.
So really, the erroneous view is that the journey we identify as seeking has something to do with becoming connected to everything, most of all to ourselves, when the truth is much simpler than that. When we feel separate, we seek transparency to ourselves, which is another way of saying we are seeking access to our own innermost level of awareness, the common awareness at the heart of reality we share with all beings. What we refer to or regard as ourselves under any circumstances is a misnomer, a misconception about our true nature, as if we are separate from any other aspect of reality. Yes, we are materially identifiable. We seem to have a separate mind, a separate body, separate speech. But reinforcing the separate self is not the path to transparency. Only in revealing the illusory nature of self do we discover the heart of reality.
When we really get it, that there is no such thing as a path to ultimate union, no such thing as an outcome or a completion we can claim, or for that matter no such thing as enlightenment per se, when we can release ourselves from every remnant of relative consciousness, separation, and especially from the illusion of time, then the brilliance of timeless awareness, the delusional reliance on rationality, the unreality of seeking, the fundamental and inseverable nature of our connection with everything is revealed. As we can no longer be separable from anything else, so we can no longer be separable from any aspect of our own nature, because at that moment, the very idea of ‘ours’ dissolves. ‘Our’ nature no longer exists. Transparency of self is revealed as the transparency (and unity) of everything, that there is no such thing as things at all. That is the revelation of emptiness, the timeless, immutable, and infinitely creative unity of all appearances.
The idea that there is a goal…is wrong. We are the goal; we are always at peace. To get rid of the idea that we are not at peace is all that is required.
---Ramana Maharshi
To realize the truth of impermanence is also to fall deeply into an illuminating devotion. Attachments to transient conditions dissolve. Knowing all things must end awakens immediacy and reverence. The revelation of emptiness is a dive into the fragility, poignance and heartbreakingly misguided suffering of samsara. This letting go means more than any accumulation. To be overwhelmed by a settled devotion of this nature and magnitude feels precisely healing and necessary. Devotional awareness, this clear perception and adoption of sacred practices everywhere are reflecting a deepening collective awareness that adopting a wholly different view of our place in the world is critical to sustaining life.
We in the Global North are fascinated by the individual. Because of this, we have excluded nature from the definition of self. We have a misguided, even surreal sense of personal agency. We reinforce the autonomy and inviolability of the self to such an extent that we are largely blind to the intra-activity of the inanimate with the animate, of the porosity of the human with the surrounding environment. Maybe we feel some satisfaction for being able to manage a few of life’s variables, grasping for permanence, living in a narrow field of choice, shutting out the invisible. To travel through that constricted field is like living with only three working coronary arteries. Not knowing what we don’t know brings a life of being constantly driven by dissatisfaction and insufficiency, denying the inevitability and essential benevolence of interruptions and diversions.
There is nothing cyclic about the worldview of modernity. We are stuck in a linear view of time in which we ascend the pyramid of success, seeking ever more extreme peak experiences. Any inclination to acknowledge the cyclic—and irrational--nature of existence is overridden by the growth imperative, a self-terminating, increasingly desperate future-oriented delusion. Seeking is the natural character of that ethic of growth because it implies perfection is just beyond our reach. It is the imperative to become more and to have more—not necessarily immediately (deferred gratification), but as soon as possible. The ethic of seeking pervades the culture of spiritual attainment, the marketplace of personal growth, including the monetization of one’s personal capital. Too many of us are on a perpetual (and ego-driven) climb toward ultimate achievement, ultimate mastery of life, the accumulation of leisure and the elimination of suffering. For a growing cohort, spiritual attainment is even equated with wealth. If you are not wealthy, your character must be flawed.
The end of seeking implies no future attainment, that what we were seeking is already here, well within our grasp, or really, already accessible by letting go of the rationalist compulsion to perfection. The end of seeking is a relaxation of agency and the illusion of control, of believing our own story, of settling into a deeper trust in and confidence with impermanence. We acknowledge that we are not in control. We become willing to be driven, rather than to sustain the illusion of being the driver of our experience—because not only is the very idea of experience suspiciously tied to ego, but the truth is also that in the supreme stillness of now, there is no one to experience anything in the first place. No experience-er and no experience. Fancy that!
Each obstacle in life is an opportunity to relieve ourselves of suffering. And alas, not discerning the nature of such messages, we still repeatedly choose our own suffering. The end of seeking becomes the end of suffering because it heralds the end of the seeker. Otherwise, we are needlessly recreating suffering in every moment, mostly without even realizing it, but especially in the very act of resisting it. We become lost in self-reinforcing cycles of disconnection, fear, and self-defeat. Instead, every breath becomes an act of faith, an act of trust and surrender, a recognition of the essential benevolence and uncompromising integrity of natural cycles, that life is always giving, even as it appears to be taking away. Life’s essential abundance is undiminished by any act, any loss, even any tragedy.
The end of seeking also implies neurotic effort and fear can be released. The ever-expanding pursuit of knowledge with its creation of an endless list of antidotes can be forgotten. Striving dissipates into a fog. The illusion of progress is fully revealed. There is nothing further to attain. The impulse to attainment itself obstructs our view. Surrender is the only option, which is not so much a choice. It is an act of stepping completely out of the field of choice, leaping over all extremes and the fences they construct. If we can realize that degree of non-attachment and find comfort and refuge there, what do we feel? I’m not speaking about resignation or collapse or helplessness. I’m speaking of fully opening to life itself beyond all dualities. In surrender, whoever we imagine we are, all the complications and baggage and story we’ve accumulated and carried around for a lifetime dissolve into an essential wisdom. We come closer to connecting with the wisdom and clarity that bore us into this world in the first place.
To suddenly regard our spiritual path as complete and to surrender into the present brings us to experience things as they really are. It is that direct visceral experience of what is/not without harboring any yearnings to fix anything that brings us face to face with what is to be done, or undone. To surrender to the end of seeking is to enter open space, enabling our descent into an absolute embodiment of unconditional (self)compassion. How could we be anything less than compassionate? To realize the Self as the heart, the source of all we know, is like walking into a river, step by step, sinking ever deeper until we are swept away into something much bigger than we can ever imagine.
Imagine how you might feel as you effortlessly slip deeper into the enveloping embrace of compassion-- the emptiness and unity of everything. Perhaps we will open to the nature of life itself as the incomparable, dynamic, bewildering, and overwhelming ongoing play of compassion. Imagine every disappointment, every celebration, every completion or incompletion, every obstacle, every triumph or failure, every emotion, every beautiful and painful moment of this life has only ever been the play of compassion, of love making itself known in the form of anything and everything.
At the end of seeking, there is nothing further to distract us. There are no more topics to put under a microscope of reason, no more controversies to debate, no more irresolvable dilemmas, no more conclusions to be carefully wrapped and tied up in a bow. There are no further antidotes to layer upon ego or that even make sense. To continue indulging in such things is an avoidance of truth. To surrender to the end of seeking is to approach this quality of knowing. We were born in compassion. We live by compassion alone. And one day we will be swept away into ultimate compassion.
As we surrender more deeply into impermanence, into devotion to a culture of life, to the earth as a collective awakening, a deepening devotion includes everything we think and do. It progresses and spreads into ever-widening circles of thought, action, and the collective unconscious. We accept the intelligence and fundamental benevolence of change, of decay, even of death. In that moment of reverie and revelation in Baker’s Cafe, reaching the end of seeking, becoming comfortable with all paradox, may have been a delusion---or it may have been the sanest moment I’ve ever experienced. It was to realize that striving and rest, presence and absence, story and the end of story, self and not-self, every apparent polarity which captures our attention drawing us back into the whirlpool of choice are not polarities at all. They are all finally exhausted. I stepped off the ladder of achievement. There was nothing left to be unearthed, processed, or accomplished. Escape has always been accessible, a subtle spontaneous instant away.
Our capture by dualism is the primary delusion of this time and all time. The end of seeking implies a cracking of that delusion, an end to holding ourselves apart, of identifying with the mind. Our enslavement to ourselves as subjects and to the world as object is ruptured. We pass through a gateway to common ‘knowing,’ common experience, a common ground of no identity, of rapid, nameless, compelling emergence, the continuous self-organizing benevolent intelligence of life. We glimpse a new relationality and a new freedom, a release from the psychological imperatives to ‘become better.’
When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky. ---Longchenpa
We’re all heading to that same place by different paths and according to different schedules and…as Longchenpa himself would insist...we are at that place already. The tantric view articulates what amounts to the end of seeking, the arrival of complete knowing embedded in every instant of experience, with no further insufficiency, no further need to perseverate on what confounds us. To see the face of Buddha in every object, animate or not, in every breath, in every instant of living and dying, regardless of however beneficial or tragic they may appear to be, we will have crossed over into the nondual view. There is nothing further to learn—except to be present with whatever appears to interrupt this completion all the time. In life, it is a rare moment to witness the resolution of appearance and emptiness, en-tango-ed as they are. At least that is the extent to which our conceptual apparatus can grasp the paradox. Noting this, every step becomes an act of surrender, an act of trust, an act of faith.
The image of balancing on an edge between duality and nonduality, being that edge, returns again and again, elaborating the intrinsic congruence of all appearance with the truth of emptiness. Despite living in a world perpetually seeking ascension, the paradox is not of either getting there or being there, but of being both, simultaneously and perpetually, having no destination, living on a Möbius strip of arising and disappearing. ‘Where do I stop and where does the world begin’ is a question which can no longer be asked, let alone answered.