Are you on a search?

Are you thinking about leaving the safe shores of your home to explore the unknown?

What is it that is pushing you?

You feel that you need to find yourself?

You are thinking that going somewhere will help you find it?

Do you have to practice twenty more years of meditation to finally get it?

How many new practices do you have to learn to finally be at peace?

Strange right, because, of course, at a biological level, you are already complete.

You are home of trillions of cells, biological processes, drives, feelings, sensations, perceptions.

You can move about, search for food, reproduce.

You are the perfect conduit for life. You are more than that.

You are life itself.

How could it be otherwise?

A tree is fully a tree, a dog is fully a dog, but, as human, you instead feel incomplete.

You have this nagging feeling of just not being enough.

A yearning for something else.

A sense of homesickness.

A basic level of incompleteness that pushes you to search.

Why?

Because consciousness, the basic energy of the Universe, that permeates all things,

is longing to find itself.

As all classical teaching go, consciousness can manifest in humans,

through our mind, sensations, perceptions, feelings, and awareness.

Consciousness is actually what supports them energetically, what lights them up, so to speak.

Without it there would be no juice.

The main "problem" arises when consciousness feeds your mind.

It seems to kind of gets stuck in “your” thoughts.

Once there, unable to let go, misses home, like a castaway would.

Mind has been a useful biological tool in human evolution. It has come handy to remember where our food supplies were year after year, plan for the winter, communicate instructions to others,

and create culture and societies.

If you look closely you can see that mind function is for movement.

Mind wants you to go from point A to point B.

It can do this in space and time.

It creates distance between the now and some imagined moment or place.

Something you want to achieve, somewhere you want to go, some experience you want to relive. Maybe a better version of yourself you have to get to. Maybe a better job or a new relationship you want. Maybe an old story you would like to rewrite.

Mind creates time. There is no time outside the mind.

Time is created by comparison.

To measure time, you need a “measurer”.

How do you know you are older if you do not compare yourself to a younger you?

The question is: who is doing the comparison?

Who is seeing the change?

Whoever can see the change, cannot be the change.

It has to be outside, otherwise it would not see it.

You can not see the train moving if you are on it.

Therefore, there is something “inside of you” that never changes.

Something that can see the movements of the mind that creates time.

Something permanent.

Maybe you are already eighty years old, but you still feel very young inside, right?

How come?

Because at the core, you are as old as when you were a teenager.

Exactly the same.

As a matter of fact, you are as young as you have ever been,

and as old as you will ever be.

Because the core never changes.

It is timeless.

It comes before the mind that calculates time and space.

It was there when you were born and it will be there when you die.

It is your unborn essence.

Consciousness, another word for it.

That which lights everything up.

Some called it God, others Buddha Nature, others the Great Tao.

The permanent nature of enlightenment.

The "I am that I am"

that Moses received as an answer

when he asked God who he was.

Obviously not something that you can achieve.

Because achieving implies time.

Which is more mind activity.

Something you already are.

You do not see it because consciousness gets stuck in thoughts, and through thoughts you try to find it, which is just being lost in more thoughts.

The same thing that kept you away in the first place.

Thoughts are forms.

As consciousness permeates all forms, it seems to be "tricked" by them,

Some people become more attached to thoughts, some to emotions,

some just crave more sensations.......

Maybe this is just what consciousness wants. It is all part of the big game.

As modern humans we spend most of our time in thoughts.

Maybe consciousness enjoys them, as they have become such powerful agents for creation.

Maybe it rejoices of all the high energy man-made structures

we see around us and all the ways we live by.

All products of our thoughts.

As humans we have mistaken this expression of consciousness for who we are.

Thinking has become our main sense of identity.

We think we are the tool.

Instead of using it to go from point A to point B.

We are now used by it.

The mind has taken over.

We have habituated ourself to mind activity so much, that we have come to think that this all there is. We freeze in fear if some part of of our mind is threatened.

We defend it at all costs.

Even killing if necessary.

The creation has gone too far, creating immense suffering.

So how to we get out of it?

Using mindfulness.

The word mindfulness is the translation of the word satti, that in Pali language, means:

to remember.

Remember what?

Our true nature. Consciousness.

How do we do that?

Realising when the mind-made sense of self takes over.

This way awareness is freed of the spell created by the mind.

Once we recognise that a thought is just a though, this naturally subsides,

and awareness can now rest in the space left by it.

We have become aware of being aware.

Once this is realised, there is nothing else to do.

Consciousness is at peace.

It can see itself through the door of "our" awareness, so to speak.

It has found itself again.

And we can finally breath out and relax,

(did you do just that?)

The journey is over.

So why bother? Why does consciousness want to go on a trip?

Because when "you" are looking, what is doing the search is actually consciousness itself.

So in the end, it does not matter what you find.

It is the act of searching that counts.

What “you” are looking for and what is looking are the same thing.

Being lost in thoughts for a while its just part of the plan.

It makes for a useful comparison.

So that when you are out of the train and on the platform,

the stillness inside you can see that the train was moving.

The permanent nature of yourself, sees the impermanent, that which comes and goes.

This is why the hero goes on an odyssey, but at the end he always comes back home.

As all the classical stories go.

He realises that being aware of being aware is the end of all journeys.

He just needed to be lost for a while, to finally realise that nothing in the material world can compare to this the deeper sense of self.

No adventures, no achievements, no relationships, no possessions, no deeds.

Nothing can stand up to it.

Why?

Because when everything else passes away, consciousness is always there.

The base of it all.

The canvass upon which everything is written.

Try for yourself.

So, no matter how many retreats or churches you go to, how many prostrations you do,

how many prayers you say.

You can only find yourself in the here and now, when you realise you are already complete

just the way you are.

The more you let go of the thought-created sense of identity,

the more your awareness in energised.

What energise it?

The juice, consciousness itself, that was temporarily trapped in thoughts.

Thought have now have lost their power over "you".

Awareness becomes more important.

When you see this,

you realise that you are nothing less than the life force of the Universe,

consciousness,

wanting to experience itself through you.

what else is there to search for?

C.

PS: you may still go on a journey and just enjoy the experience!