The Great Search
The realization of the Non-dual traditions is
uncompromising: there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only
Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the
very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate — each and
all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they
are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but
Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust,
is more or less Spirit than any other.
This realization undoes the Great Search that is the
heart of the separate-self sense. The separate-self is, at bottom,
simply a sensation of seeking. When you feel yourself right now, you
will basically feel a tiny interior tension or contraction — a sensation
of grasping, desiring, wishing, wanting, avoiding, resisting — it is a
sensation of effort, a sensation of seeking.
In its highest form, this sensation of seeking takes on
the form of the Great Search for Spirit. We wish to get from our
unenlightened state (of sin or delusion or duality) to an enlightened or
more spiritual state. We wish to get from where Spirit is not, to where
Spirit is.
But there is no place where Spirit is not. Every single
location in the entire Kosmos is equally and fully Spirit. Seeking of
any sort, movement of any sort, attainment of any sort: all profoundly
useless. The Great Search simply reinforces the mistaken assumption that
there is some place that Spirit is not, and that I need to get from a
space that is lacking to a space that is full. But there is no space
lacking, and there is no space more full. There is only Spirit.
The Great Search for Spirit is simply that impulse, the
final impulse, which prevents the present realization of Spirit, and it
does so for a simple reason: the Great Search presumes the loss of God.
The Great Search reinforces the mistaken belief that God is not present,
and thus totally obscures the reality of God’s ever-present Presence.
The Great Search, which pretends to love God, is in fact the very
mechanism of pushing God away; the mechanism of promising to find
tomorrow that which exists only in the timeless now; the mechanism of
watching the future so fervently that the present always passes it by —
very quickly — and God’s smiling face with it.
•.☆.•
the separate-self is simply a sensation of seeking
The Eye of Spirit: an integral vision for a world gone slightly mad
introduces Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and includes a great non-dual
section in the last chapter. This excerpt contains the first few
paragraphs from that chapter.
•.☆.•
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