Seeking by Not Seeking

Again and again I keep coming back to one fundamental mysterious theme about life: the idea that life as we think we know it, as we think and believe we experience it as individual personalities, is ultimately an illusion. Behind our beliefs and thoughts and attachment to our little individual ego-self, there is a vast hidden reality - the infinite reality of God-consciousness. Between our ego-self and that reality is a veil obscuring our comprehension of that reality.

I believe the ultimate purpose in life must be to cut through that veil to the other side and realize the full truth of who we are (this is what is meant by "waking up"). But the ultimate-ultimate truth behind even that concept, is the truth that there is really no veil at all and never has been. What we are is really not separate from God-consciousness. We, asleep in our ego-self that experiences life as a separate personality, have created that veil. This veil helps to keep us in the illusion of our separate-self inside this world and universe of material forms.

Our experience as an individual ego-self is really the story of the Prodigal Son: we are God's child, gone off on a journey (pilgrimage) to a seemingly distant place (the universe/world of form) to come to know what it is like to have the experience of being an individual self. The underlying reality is that we are still and always have been One with God. We are not separate forms. We are Consciousness evolving and coming into Being. God is coming into Being in and through us, experiencing Himself in you and me and in each and every form, experiencing birth and death and birth again, endlessly. We are the eternally infinite experiencing a finite changing universe. Eventually our form will come to an end, bringing us back, Face to Face with the Father, with our True Self.

But what joy if we can realize this truth while being on the journey, inside the dream! To know that you ARE the Prodigal Son and that it is possible, at any moment, to know, realize, experience, that you and the Father are One? That is the big dilemma and paradox! We seek after this reality not realizing that to seek is to lose what you seek. To seek by not seeking. How can we do it?

Here's a profound quotation from Gangaji in her book, YOU ARE THAT! It's in the form of a dialog, with the student's words italicized:

I know in my mind that these formulations, this body, all these things that I do, are not the truth of who I am. Why--

Knowing this intellectually is insufficient.

I know that!

Stop knowing anything. Stop the search for intellectual understanding. Stop asking why. Every time why arises, it only takes you deeper into intellect. The only answer for why is why not?

You are being called to that which is beyond mental knowledge. You are being called to direct experience. You are hungry for direct experience, and direct experience is not found in any formulation of intellect.

Be still, and then more still, and even more still.

Be still beyond belief. Then that which cannot be known reveals itself, both fresh and ancient, beyond any polarity of knowing or not knowing.

What is needed in stillness?

What survives stillness?

Stay here. Let stillness dissolve belief in any substantiality of independent existence.

Then there is no way to really know, because if you know, your mind is interpreting what consciousness is.

There is pure being, which is where individual being gets its power. There is pure consciousness, which is where limited, individual consciousness gets its power. Pure knowing is not known, nor is it storable, because it is bigger than what can be known from past memory or categories. It is immaculate. It leaves no tracks. It is what space is in, so it is even subtler than space.

And here is a quote about Gurdjieff's ideas, written by Jacob Needleman, from the Introduction to The Inner Journey (an excellent anthology on the Gurdjieff Work by PARABOLA magazine):

Man, Gurdieff taught, is an unfinished creation. He is not fully Man, in the sense of a cosmically unique being whose intelligence and power of action mirror the energies of the source of life itself. On the contrary, man, as he is, is an automaton. Our thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. In Gurdjieff's terms, we cannot do anything. In and around us, everything "happens" without the participation of an authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive and deeply internalized influence of culture and education, which engrave in us the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only a fractured egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will.

It sounds very dualistic - life comes down to whether we realize we have the potential to wake up, and then do what we can to achieve it (seeking by not seeking), or whether we will go through life asleep, an automaton, mechanically reacting to stimuli, mistaking this dream-world and dream-self as reality.