The Seeker and the Sought
We do our sādhana to fulfill our wish to have the state of Union revealed within us. This revelation is a sacred unfolding of our individual awareness, a divine dance in which the seeker and sought merge into One—as Consciousness both expands outward and draws inward, progressively realizing Its own universal nature. However, remembering this possibility can be difficult when we face the challenges of our life.
I’m happy to support students when they are encountering some tension in themselves or in the world, which really means maneuvering through the limitations of their own understanding. But in doing so, I always remind them that it's vitally important to not lose contact with the very Grace that is revealing that we are at once the seeker and the sought. And it's very easy for us to lose sight of that when we're battling it out with ourselves or with the conditions we encounter. In other words, as we play the game of life, we need to remember why we are slugging through those tensions and why we are engaging in the different dynamics of our lives.
It is the penetration through those obscurations that is the essence of spiritual practice. There’s never a denial of the obscuration—but we must recognize that it is an energy that binds our highest Self into misunderstanding about Its true nature. When we get caught in contraction, we focus on our limited experience and miss opening to a greater possibility. The full measure of our sādhana is to be deeply in tune with the intent of the Divine Presence that is revealing Itself to us every moment, and to match our intent with that Divine Will. It’s like being two places at once, and nowhere at all.
Five-fold Acts of the Divine
God is revealing Him/Herself through everything that conceals that Presence. Tradition talks about the five-fold acts of the Divine: creation, maintenance, dissolution, concealment, and revelation. These Acts are all happening in a nanosecond, in one unbounded moment beyond time, and in every moment of our lives. The critical factor is our own consciousness: our ability to be still, and through our capacity for self-reflection, to recognize when we're caught in some tension or challenge and lose sight of our own intent. We must never forget what's on the other side of the difficulty.
One of the extraordinary discussions in all nondual practices (and certainly in our practice of Anuttara Trika), is that all of those challenges are a portal into higher understanding. We never deny the challenges—or moan and groan about why they're in our life—but we must recognize them as the means and the opportunity to discover that in any situation there is an essence that is ever-present, seeking us, revealing Itself to us. That is Grace.
This requires a two-dimensional engagement with our own practice. We can penetrate through, deal with, organize ourselves around, and direct our energies through whatever constrictions of experience we find ourselves trapped in, whether they're internal or somehow perceived as something external. At the same time, we recognize that these are not separate, but are two dynamics, two dimensions of One singularity of experience. We have the capacity to look deeper than the apparent challenge we encounter to recognize Unity. What a miracle to have that capacity. What a gift!
Escaping the Quicksand
What if we were just buried in the quicksand of misunderstanding? When someone gets trapped in quicksand, the impulse might be to fight—but that just makes you sink faster! Ideally, we’d spot the trap before walking into it, but if we do get caught, we must use our discriminating capacity to see what’s happening, and then take a breath, bring the fear, tension or thought back into the heart, open inside, and ask, What do I have to do now?
This is what it means to be conscious, to be aware when we are being consumed by our misunderstanding and then to choose to not allow ourselves to be buried by it. The miracle of consciousness, the miracle of Grace, is that we can be aware of the energies that are fueling the engines of our own life. We can recognize that when we’re bound in misunderstanding, there is an extraordinary tendency for that contraction to consume our life force.
The important thing is that we engage in the challenge of freeing ourselves from that constriction. I recently read a nondual scripture that essentially said, “Those who have the courage to be freed are freed.” So amazing! This is the courage of consciousness to not shrink back from the difficulties of life, but to become the spiritual warrior who affirms: This too, I shall overcome.
It is self-awareness that allows us to act from consciousness. We have the capacity to recognize what dimension of consciousness we're living in and acting from. And if we're acting from tension, if we're acting from ego, then we know that things tend to go in the direction they've been going.
To escape that self-reinforcing loop, we must be aware of our state and remember that life is a relationship between the seeker and the sought—and that this Divine Awareness is ever-present in us. The way we nourish it is to take a breath and pour our own consciousness, and even our own misunderstanding, back inside, into that Awareness. I implore you: Do not lose sight of the miracle of your life, that you can recognize and actuate that deeper Consciousness with you, because you choose to do so.