She came to talk at me about her spiritual journey. I write about the spiritual, I talk about it, I live it, so we must be in agreement about the importance of everything she’s found along the road of her life. Often, there is a great disconnect with people who are interested in certain topics. They read how they listen, which is to say they don’t read at all. They see some key words they identify with and fill in the rest with thought and assumption. Not coincidentally, this is also how they treat the people and cultures they take from along the road of their personal journey.
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The brain cherishes you because you are it in reaction to the world. You are control. You are the accumulation of thoughts acting out. But brain-you is unlit by Truth. Truth is clarity and wholeness. Truth has no need to seek, no desire in any direction. Brain sees Truth as a challenge to its authority, when, in fact, the healthy human does not leave brain in charge. Brain rebels against Truth even to the extent that it projects its self as a seeker of Truth. This seeker defends his or her “journey” at all costs, and the journey never ends because the journey is the seeker.
In other words, there is no such thing as a noun. There is no seeker, only seeking, journeying. A seeker separate from the action of seeking is an illusion. That illusion may claim to exist and be on a spiritual journey fueled by passion and curiosity, but that, too, is an illusion.
The spiritual compulsion to restlessly seek is rooted in boredom. Boredom tells us to keep moving so that we never settle into our wholeness because simply being is the ending of the person in motion. Being is the ending of doing. And so the doer must perpetually do… whatever. Whatever is next. Next and next and more next, please!
This constant absorption of knowledge and moving on means that we unconsciously treat other people, other cultures from whom we are taking and then leaving, as objects. They’re there to help us, to add onto our body of knowledge. We take what we like and discard the rest. Then we may claim to be like their mystics, their holy people, their medicine people, because we’ve absorbed some of what they taught. But we never lived in their culture, never grew up under their apprenticeship. We want to be masters of what they know and we will settle for learning a little and then claiming mastery. This is the interior version of how we “conquer” the external world, shaking hands with the natives and then stealing their resources, people, animals, trees. We unconsciously debase the very cultures we hold in high regard and seek out to teach us.
Reading all of this may grate against you. You may think it is bunk because we categorize spiritual seeking as something higher than mere boredom. We talk about it with reverence. It evokes a feeling inside, like we’re onto something, like we’re evolving. That feeling is how the doer mistranslates the call to being—the call to blossoming into one’s fullest expression right now. Not in time after some lessons, some trial and error, but right this moment to be all that you are, which means not doing anything, which evokes fear of death.
Off we go on another journey.