The Myth of Seeking and the Reality of What Is Already Here

We spend so much time looking for the donkey while we are already sitting on its back. It is a strange comedy, this spiritual search, where the separate self tries to find a totality that it never actually left. We gather in silence, perhaps under the guise of a morning meditation or a moment of stillness, but who is it that is really meditating? And what are we trying to achieve? If we look closely, we find that there is no path to travel because there is nowhere to go. The absolute is not a destination at the end of a long journey; it is the very ground upon which the seeker stands while they are busy looking for the map. We often think of practices like meditation as ladders we must climb to reach a higher state of awareness. But let’s be frank: a ladder is only useful if there is a "there" that is different from "here." In the reality of the absolute, there is no "there." Everything is already included. The perfect and the imperfect, the generosity and the greed, the silence and the noise—it is all the same dance of being. When we sit in a morning meditation, it might make the body-mind feel more comfortable or the thoughts feel a bit more lucid, like a bright steel wire in a vacuum. That is fine. It is a natural movement of the body-mind, like breathing or sleep. But it won't bring you to enlightenment, because enlightenment isn't something that can be possessed by a "you." Liberation is not the liberation of the separate self; it is liberation *from* the separate self. It is the realization that the character in the dream was never the one in charge of the awakening. Think of the deep sleep we all enter every night. In that state, there is no "I," no history, no problems, and no seeking. There is just a profound, non-dual peace. When the body-mind wakes up, the sense of "I am" emerges. It feels like it is the center of the world, creating space and time, building a past and a future out of memories and expectations. But even in the midst of all that mental noise, the underlying silence—the same silence of deep sleep—never actually went away. It is the screen upon which the movie of your life is projected. The screen doesn't change whether the movie is a tragedy or a comedy. We often get caught up in the idea of "mindful movement" or spiritual progress, as if we are building a better version of ourselves. While it is true that at a horizontal level we can learn, improve, and take care of the body-mind, this has nothing to do with the absolute. The absolute is vertical. It is a sudden drop into what is already the case. Whether you are a saint or a sinner, the aware presence that allows your existence to be known is exactly the same. The wave doesn't need to practice being the ocean; it already is the ocean, even when it thinks it is just a small, lonely wave destined to crash against the shore. Why do we keep searching? Perhaps because the separate self is terrified of its own non-existence.