There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality.”
- Ramana Maharshi
Not accepting this paradox is the cause of much of our suffering, as we are forever chasing horizons, forever searching for some secret of life other than where we are.
“There is the search that chases life and the search that reveals life.”
Still the impulse to search is natural and human. We are born with a thirst for love and truth and meaning. But the deeper forms of search have no destination. At these deeper levels, we search more like fish who keep swimming because if they don’t keep water moving through their gills, they will die. Astonishingly, It doesn’t matter where they go, just that they go. For creatures living in the deep, this endless search is a way of being.
As spirits in bodies living on Earth, we swim through the rivers of time and experience, and the heart is our gill.
- Mark Nepo
The search that reveals life is different than the search for gold, or an image of love, or an image of God. The storyteller Margo McLoughlin says, “I know my practice is slipping when I don’t feel wonder or awe.” This is a good way to discern if we’ve drifted from the search that reveals life-where-we-are to the search which assumes that what matters is always somewhere else. When these deep teachers remain absent too long, we must renew the deeper practice of searching without searching, of seeking with no destination. We must relax and open the gill of the heart.
When we are involved in the the pursuit of happiness, we assume that joy in an emotion. We imagine that joy is a state other than what we are currently experiencing - a state in which we feel exceedingly happy all the time.
Joy may be expressed physically, mentally, and emotionally, but it is not an emotion. Joy is a relationship we have with our emotional body in which we allow ourselves to feel all emotional states moving through our field of experience. It is a conscious communion with the vibrational. Joy takes us into The Kingdom of Life, where all is constantly created anew.
Michael Brown, “Inner Alchemy”
In the stillness of the morning I hear the whispers
calling me to expand
to release this illusion that I call “My life”.
And in those lucid moments of awakening
when my mind is not active enough to filter this voice
I feel the fullness and the vibration of
Love.
Joy.
Truth.
I Am Life.
I Am One.
I Am Divine.
There is no separation.
- Patti Wardlaw