It always starts with profound discomfort, or a nagging psychological itch, or a genuine crisis. Something within us becomes aware that there is something more, something we are not figuring out, something just out of our reach but its there, very surely there. It’s like our heart knows something that our brain does not and that creates an imbalance that makes us very uncomfortable. What is it that I’m missing?
When the question becomes powerful enough, the answer arrives in the form of a book, a discussion with a friend, or a teacher. Usually this first level answer is some sort of “fix it” type answer. We find some solution to our crisis, or we learn how to deal with our anxieties, how to make more money; or we are trained in the language of psychology, success coaching, self improvement or personal development. Some people jump into more spiritual matters, but even then, usually in the beginning, the answer is “ fix it” variety.
At this point we usually become happy for a while thinking we have found our solution to all our questions. However this happiness rarely lasts very long, usually no more than a few months to maybe a year or so. But it serves its purpose; it whets our appetite and shows us the path to our inner world. The Seeker has been born, now the seeking begins. The Seeker, in all its varieties of seeking, has one ultimate agenda: how to become One with the true Source of power (some call it finding God, some call it returning to the Source, some call it becoming enlightened).
The Seeker looks around and sees the world in its appalling misery, his or her own less than per perfect life, and says, “There must be a solution to this!” and the heart concurs “Yes! There is! Keep seeking.”
The next level answer usually arrives in the form of some “white magic” type spiritual knowledge: how to make the universe do what I want it to do. People learn about the law of attraction, power of thought, mind power, or even full on magical rituals. And guess what? Lo and behold! It works! These are the happiest days of the Seeker! It has learned how to control the Universe. It feels it has found that thing that everyone is looking for and it feels now it can finally begin to party in life full steam ahead.
Unfortunately, like all honeymoons, this also ends at some point and Life somehow teaches the Seeker that not all things are subject to its mind power and magic, in fact the more the Seeker uses those powers, the more life becomes complicated. The more the Seeker rigidly tries to hold on to magic and mind power, the more suffering it experiences.
At some point the Seeker figures out there must be some other better way, and so the search continues.
In the next level the Seeker learns the futility of control and is trained to surrender instead of trying to make everything go according to its own will and volition. The Seeker learns that the less one pushes, the less one fights, the more one allows things to unfold, the more harmonious life becomes. This is a hard les son for the Seeker to learn but once one learns it, life becomes easier again, with less conflict, struggle and fight. One learns the art of Glowing, the art of surrender.
For a lot of people this level of learning is associated with a return to religion and an act of surrender to God and His will. Since most religions speak of surrender to Gods will, the Seeker believes that the an answer must be in the religion itself.
Some people stay stuck in this level forever because religion brings a tremendous sense of psychological security… heaven, afterlife, a sense of familiarity due to one’s own childhood conditioning, and not to mention the sense of solidarity with all other members of the same religion… and psychological security is the ESSENCE of what the Seeker was seeking all this while.
But no matter how much psychological security the Seeker finds in surrender, that nagging discomfort of not knowing does not go away. And at some point, after suffering ten years or ten life times, in one moment of total honesty, total surrender, with the power of all consuming fire of total suffering, the Seeker finally asks the root question, the question that collapses all other questions: Who Am I?
At this point, the Seeker realizes this profoundly uncomfortable thing: I don’t know who I am, and since I don’t know who I am, I cannot possibly know what anything means and all my beliefs and ideas are nothing but shadows! Everything I think is good, bad, real, unreal, are all based on the faulty premise of who I think I am and who I think I am is nothing but a summation of conditioning: social, cultural, religious, economic, personal and collective conditioning; conditioning that has been my filter of life since the day I could begin to think verbally, and everything I think I am is nothing but the voice of this conditioning, and this conditioning is nothing but sum total of all manmade assumptions that is at the root of all the suffer ing of the world, that is passed down from generation to generation. The moment the Seeker truly realizes this uncomfortable fact (not as a theoretical discussion but as an actual observation), he wonders: since I don’t even know who I am, how can I know what anything else is?
This is usually referred to as the Dark Night Of The Soul, but what it really is, is the dark night of the Seeker, the ego. This “dark night” can last for days or months and as long as it lasts it’s very painful and even depressing. Yet ironically enough, the “dark night” lasts only as long it takes for the Seeker to get sick and tired of playing around and trying to avoid that final confrontation with Infinity. The “dark night” has one purpose, to show the Seeker the futility of faking it!
And so, one day after the long journey of seeking, after the painful period of not knowing anything, after questioning and thereby tearing apart every belief and ideology, after suffering so much that one can’t suffer anymore… the next level answer arrives!
The Seeker realizes this: there is NO Seeker! The one who has been seeking all this while is not a real per son, it’s an IDEA, it’s a network of thoughts created through a process of years and years of conditioning: childhood, social, religious, economic, geographic, ethnic, psychological, spiritual conditioning! There is not even one Seeker, the one with the name (put your own name here), but only a movement of thought that creates an illusion of individuality. There is no continuity of the Seeker either (one me that was born and has grown to be an adult today) but again another illusion of continuity created by memory. In reality the Seeker is just another face of the same underlying thought based entity, popularly known as the Ego. Sometimes this ego becomes a loving father, sometimes a selfish businessman, sometimes a blind political supporter, sometimes a spiritual seeker; and all these different faces pretend they are all the same, one person, but they are not. There is no One Me inside! The illusion of one Me is created by the support of one name (which is your name) and inherited neurotic thought patterns.
So, the Seeker, for good reasons, tries to run! Run as far away as possible from this realization. Of all the things that the Seeker thought enlightenment would be, this was not on the list. The Seeker wanted to be enlightened, to know the deepest secrets of the Universe, to sit on the right hand of God… but not this!
At this point, if you are in the hands of a good teacher, before the Seeker is able to run away, the damage will be done, the Seeker will die, the seed will be planted, awareness will awaken, true spiritual awakening will happen! The One who is behind all the seeking, behind all the ideas and knowledge, behind all the conditioning, behind all the filters… has awakened. This is not the “me” who wanted to be enlightened, but something far deeper than “me”. This is not the Seeker, whose death is the hallmark of true awakening, meaning genuinely we are no longer seeking anymore. This is the nameless, limitless One Life… the background consciousness that is the Source and life force of all reality, which is within each of us and yet beyond all that is manifested.
However, no matter how good the teacher maybe, no one can keep you bound forever, and one day you walk away from the retreat or the ashram, or if it happened to you through your own efforts then your own meditation room. And after a period of blissful inner peace and unthinkable freedom you find that even if the Seeker is dead, the egoic consciousness is very much still there. And you wonder how is it that the ego still survives after such profound experience of awakening? (The ego is that that state of consciousness that allows you to perceive time and duality with the support of collective conditioning and knowledge, it is the voice of the “me”.)
The answer of course is that the ego is very much a necessary component of this physical world. It has its functions like clothes and cars have their functions. You need the ego to have social relationships, to make a profit in a business, to play a sport and all that involves you perceiving duality in any shape or form. The ego is your lens through which you perceive duality. The problem of course happens when you get IDEN–‐ TIFIED with the ego TOTALLY and believe that the egoic view of the world is the ONLY view and that is the ABSOLUTE truth rather than a point of view, like a world seen through a colored lens, which is what it really is. When you get IDENTIFIED with the ego, you lose your perspective as the One Life beyond duality, you begin to feel everything and everyone is separate from you, and life is basically you against the world. If you think through this, you will find out that the moment you get identified with the ego, is the moment true compassion and empathy ends, and every action you perform gives birth to conflict, within and without.
The next problem is that because this is a journey of evolution, and because we have spent millions of years or fifty thousand years or fifty life times (whichever you find easier to believe) in the grasp of our ego (which means a specific way of using our brain), its very easy for us to fall back into the egoic mode of perception from our awakened state which is a very recent evolutionary achievement.
And so the rest of the journey for the Awake One, as long as we are here on this earth in this body, is to play this game of cars and credit cards and marriages and children with as much fun as possible remaining as awake as possible. In an ideal situation, we play our game of duality intensely and passionately with integrity, impeccability and style, all the while remaining aware of our true identity in the back–‐ ground, which is the One Consciousness itself through one and all, experiencing itself within the multitudes, the Unity within multiplicity. If we are awake, truly awake, we play this game of duality as long as it is fun and enjoyable and when it’s getting too serious, we simply snap back to our original state. We do what we need to do but we never forget the truth in our heart.
This post is an excerpt from the book “Awakening to the Infinite” by Shafin de Zaine
Image Credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/howard_roark/3925741563
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/2272570051
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhojleunamme/7778960290