The Selfish Circle of the Spiritual Quest
Accept life on its terms and it becomes a lot more interesting. Keep believing there is more, and you are on a chase for your own tail that takes you nowhere. Yet, many of us, possibly most of us, end up on spiritual journeys that take up years, sometimes decades of our lives.
Most likely it’s our culture that sends us looking for more, treasuring the idea that we can somehow rise above the problems of life, that there is something more special, almost magical within our grasp. We are raised to believe there is more than life itself, that what we see, in each single moment is not enough. Dissatisfaction abounds, and is encouraged by promises of more, of better.
Religions and spiritual teachers hold promise of enlightenment, or the big reward in the sky, Heaven. And so we look around, we struggle and we suffer, and we want and crave for more.
The spiritual quest is one many of us most go on, because we have to see for ourselves that this is it. Ironically, many spiritual quests give you the tools to do just that. But it’s a selfish circle you travel. The eye goes from looking outward into life, to peering inward. All attention ends up on the self, vying for improvement, for change, for that experience that elevates one into the wordless they hear so much about.
If you do it right, you end up right back where you started from, the same person you were before, but now free of the dreams, the delusions, the hopes of being someone else, somewhere above it all. Unfortunately, the human mind is an amazing source of creativity and imagination, it creates our reality on many levels, and no one can deceive you more convincingly than your own mind.
If you want it bad enough, you can teach your brain to create amazing experiences, experiences that are every bit as real as physical reality and equally convincing. But the interpretation that the event of metaphysical or religious is incorrect. If you use the other tools you’ve been taught, such as meditation and mindfulness, you can eventually see these experiences for what they really are: semi-lucid dreams, hallucinations, and fabrications.
But don’t get me wrong. The spiritual quest, though circular and selfish, is often exactly what is needed to ground us back into physical reality, to show us how we operate in the world, to see how incredibly deceptive and convincing our own minds are. If you look hard enough, spend enough time being as skeptical of the inner landscape as the outter, you will see you are and have been, always, exactly that which you sought.
For some time, the spiritual journey is a distraction, a layer that comes between you and that which you desire. When you drop the want, the need to be other than here, in this moment, in this life, in this second being lived, you find this is all there needs to be, this is it.
It’s wonderful to see through the beliefs, the yearning, the delusions and illusions, and look to the simplicity and complexity of life itself. You can only then be content with what you’ve been dealt. Attachments drop away. Identity through labels becomes meaningless, and the need to be “spiritual” becomes a thing of the past. The search ends because you have what you sought. The cherished, selfish self takes a back seat to an amazing throng of arising and fading processes.
As you see how the self process operates, how frequently thoughts and emotions are overrated and taken too seriously, how views and ideas are just that, you loose interest in being selfish, and turn outward to be more selfless. You can open to outter concerns, to the interdependence of all people, animals, environment and worldly things. The connections are easier to see, and the idea of anything existing in and of itself becomes ridiculous. The circle becomes laughable. The quest a bit of a joke. Yet, the tools remain useful until they too are unnecessary.
Go on the spiritual/religious quest, but don’t be surprised when you discover you were already there and this is what there is.
Tags: awareness, enlightenment, journey, quest, religion, spiritual
September 19th, 2011 at 12:58 am
This is exactly the process I’ve just gone through. I wrote a really long series of posts on my own blog about it, but then I find this which is elegant and succinct. Great way of putting it.