The End of Seeking

Once awakeness has been recognized, it’s easy to fall back into complacency and laziness. We may think, if the light has been turned on, there is nothing more to do. But authentic awakening is radical. It is not something that we do for 20 minutes twice a day and then tick off our “to do” list—it’s a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year job that calls us to be ruthlessly honest. You either meet life consciously or you get lost in the dream. There’s no halfway. You can’t be semi-conscious. You can’t meet life consciously only when it feels good or you get things to go your way, but then get lost in the story when it all goes wrong or it hurts. What you can do is become aware of what is still unconscious in you. This resolve to be vigilant is the fertilizer for the deeper awakening required if there is to be a real transformation in your inner and outer world.

Whether you have temporarily glimpsed an awakened state that has vanished, or the light of awakening has revealed itself as the background of your life, or even if you have not yet glimpsed awakening but something inexorably draws you toward it, there is very possibly something in these words that will fan the flame of truth so that it becomes a furnace of radical awakeness within you. When this furnace has consumed all false notions of what an awakened life should look like, the incessant search for anything other than this ever-unfolding moment comes to an end. And what remains is an unending river of grace, both ineffably divine and utterly ordinary.

The discovery that allows you to finally rest in this river of grace does not require your past to be healed of what was broken nor for your future to be more wonderful than what is happening now. The recognition of awakeness as the inherent nature of all things, including oneself, puts an end to the endless search for a better self or a better life. It’s the end of seeking and the beginning of the possibility of true healing.

This opportunity for healing comes when there is a conscious willingness to open to the totality of you. This willingness is an all or nothing affair. For true healing to take place, you can’t just open to the bits you like and circumvent the rest. You have to embrace the whole lot, the light and the dark, the enlightened and the unenlightened, the heavenly and the hellish. This is a kind of responsibility in which the “awake I” chooses to give itself in service to awakeness itself. This isn’t about achieving a state of perfection. It’s about welcoming the light of awakeness into everyday life.

When awakening is embodied, there is an abiding recognition that nothing can touch, taint, or harm the beingness of which you are the living expression. While the ripples of your story continue to reverberate through your body-mind experience, and when discomfort, irritation, anger, or anything else arises, you will not cling to the idea that you need more healing or therapy to get rid of this apparently unenlightened energy. Instead you will rest in the truth of your unadulterated nature and simply meet the energy with tender curiosity.

It’s the capacity to be fully with what is that creates healing or wholeness. In this deep acceptance, you see that light is the nature of darkness. Awakeness does not deny the past, the history of your life, the memories, the disappointments, the heartbreaks, the regrets, and even what appear as past-life experiences. All these can be embraced in present-moment awareness so that past and future are seen to occur in the now, which is an ever-unfolding eternal moment. Your woundedness is, in fact, not what happened to you in the past, but rather your inability to stay present and open in the face of what happened. In present-moment awareness you can meet the hurt of this disconnect. And in this there is a reconnection and a healing.

It’s a fact that life will always touch you, bump into you, cut you, and even scar you in some way. But who you really are remains untouched and unscathed throughout it all. Opening up to this paradox of human existence means you become more vast than who you think you are. In this vastness, you live from the space and the silence within you. When you see that everything that happens in your inner and outer world is actually appearing within this space and silence, then there is nothing more to do in order to awaken, nothing more to achieve or attain. The search for enlightenment has ended.