Calling Off the Search

When on their 1987 masterpiece Joshua Tree U2 sang “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” everyone knew exactly what they meant. We seem hard-wired to search, a behavior we no doubt learned hunting and gathering all around the world these last hundred thousand years. An unquenchable longing pushes us toward ever new horizons. We can’t stop.

We’re driven by the illusion that some new acquisition, some new lifestyle, some new understanding, some new something will transform our lives into shimmering palaces of wisdom and bliss. We’ll be finally, completely happy, and we won’t have to search anymore. But there’s just one problem: when we finally get what we want the restlessness lingers. We carry our confusion and neurosis with us into every new situation. Wherever you go, there you are. Different day, different job, different house, different marriage, same old suffering.

Some people even think that if they pack up and move to another town everything will change. In the recovery world that’s called “doing a geographical,” the desperate hope that we can shake loose our demons if we run fast and far enough. But they all hitch a ride – every single one of them. Our demons don’t live in the outer world – they’re within us. They are us.

When Dorothy awoke in her own bed after her mystical journey to Oz, she realized the truth – “There’s no place like home.” And we are always home. Not only can we not outrun our problems, turns out we also can’t outrun our solutions. We carry them all within.

This is why the paradigm of spiritual searching fails. How can we search for truth when not one of our steps leads away from it? As we chase from one explanation to the next, trading one ideology for another, we’re forever cast adrift on the surface: all our doctrines, theologies, and philosophies exist only at the level of thought. They are purely conceptual constructs. The unbreakable whole of life eludes concepts, words, and explanations. Leaving here and going there won’t make a difference. But slowing down, stopping, and opening up will.

There are no real, lasting solutions at the level of conceptual, theoretical, ideological thought. The menu is not the food. The map is not the place. To search through thought-systems for real transformation is like wandering through a market with no money to spend. You’re just looking around – you don’t get to have any of it.

There can never be real freedom or joy at the level of thought because thoughts are always about the past or the future. Only in the eternal presence of the Now is real freedom possible. And it is the work of all authentic spiritual practice to draw us into the present moment and out of our thought-abstractions. That’s what ritual is for. That’s what contemplative, centering prayer does. That’s what luminous, sacred music does. That’s what solitude in nature does. That’s what selfless, sacred service does. That’s what meditation does.

One of the most powerful reasons present-minded consciousness is so liberating is because fear withers in the bright light of the eternal present. Fear is by definition future-thinking. It’s imaging harmful future outcomes that have not and will not happen. Fear deals exclusively in the what if. What if I get cancer? What if I forget my lines? What if this plane crashes? And yet, here and now, we’re cancer-free, we remembered our lines, and the plane is still in the air. Coming into the present moment eliminates fear – it simply can’t survive here. Truth won’t let it.

Freedom from fear is found only in the now.

           When you come fully into this present moment you awaken into the realization that there is nothing you need, nothing you want, nothing you resent, and nothing you fear – you are safe, you are loved, and you are whole. The whole world could fall away and not even a ripple would cross the pool of the bottomless stillness in which you rest like a lily pad.

            And it is only from this stillness that you can return to the field of action and do the significant work that needs to be done, not from an egotistical stance (I’m here to save you), but with the humble heart of a servant (How can I help?)

            Of all the practices designed to bring us into the liberating present, none does so much so fast as meditation. Meditation is the art and science of slipping beneath the surface of the thought stream and sinking down into the silent depths beneath the waves. Nothing else so thoroughly and effectively liberates us from the grasp of our habitual over-thinking. In meditation we simply practice shifting into what Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls the Inner Witness, that still, silent presence within us. As we learn how to witness our thoughts instead of identifying with them a subtle shift occurs – we no longer are our thoughts. Instead, we watch our thoughts drift across the sky like clouds. We thought we were the clouds, but turns out we’re the sky – the boundless, spacious awareness in which thoughts arise and fade. And when we make this shift a subtle joyful peace washes over us. We go beyond the mere concepts of peace, wellness, and wisdom – we become peace, wellness, and wisdom.

            In the world’s wisdom traditions this is called embodiment, realization, awareness, or direct experience. It is not properly “knowledge,” because knowledge is conceptual. Embodied wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge, religion, theology, doctrine, ideology, beliefs, faith, scripture, dogma, ritual, liturgy, or anything rooted in the realm of conceptual thought. 

This is why searching for the truth always fails. The entire model of searching is based on a false premise. Truth is not something over there. How can you go out looking for something you already are? In his classic book I Am That Advaita Vedanta teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way: “You are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. Enquire Who is ignorant, and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source.”

            Krishnamurti often warned his students about the perils of attachment to ideology and doctrine, or even teachers. Be wary, he said, of those who talk about the path. “Truth,” he said, “is a pathless land.” There is nothing to seek, and nowhere to go. Instead of seeking, slow down, go within and realize what you are and always have been.

Wisdom, Incorporated

What is Wisdom?

Wisdom isn’t an idea. It isn’t a doctrine or a belief. It isn’t a theory or an ideology calling for our consent.

            Wisdom isn’t a product to be bought or sold. You can’t possess it or hold it.

            Philosophy, religion, and art point to it, but they cannot contain it.

            Wisdom lies outside all ideological boundaries and conceptual frameworks. It can never be conveyed with words or teachings. Yet words and teachings point the way.

Like water, wisdom is impossible to hold. Like air it is impossible to see. And like water and air, we can’t live without it.

            How can something so elusive be so essential?

            The good news is this – wisdom is not mysterious. It is not distant, arcane, or esoteric. It is nearer to us than the blood in our veins.

            Wisdom is simple as sunrise and rich as rain.

Wisdom is a way of being in the world.

Wisdom belongs to the body, to the wholeness of what we are. It rolls through our bones like a seismic wave. It brightens our sight from the inside. It lifts our feet when the path is true. We do not gain wisdom, learn wisdom, or understand wisdom – we embody wisdom. We incorporate it into the very fiber of our being. We become wisdom.

Wisdom is what we are when we finally learn how to let go of our illusions.

The tree of wisdom has many fruits – humility, simplicity, love, willingness, and freedom. One taste is proof enough that it is real.

Parting the Curtain

Immersion in the world’s wisdom traditions takes you on a surprising trajectory. What at first seemed convoluted and contrived becomes simple and innocent. What at first seemed dry and doctrinaire becomes limber and poetic. Rules and creeds give way to the immediacy of wordless knowing. More and more you come out of thinking and into being. You finally start to see through the curtain and realize that wisdom is vast, formless, and unlike ordinary knowledge.

Knowledge is full of concepts, analogies, propositions, and finite rational sequences. Wisdom is empty and infinite.

Knowledge is the weather. Wisdom is the sky.

Closing the Gap

If wisdom is the content-free awareness of how to live well, then how do we gain wisdom? How can we close the gap between our messy, chaotic life and the promise wisdom offers? How do we move out of these clouds of confusion, suffering, and dysfunction and into the clearing of joy, freedom, and wellness? The journey begins and ends in humility.

We must first admit our ignorance. We must first admit that all of our ideas about everything are second-hand. After a great house cleaning of belief, superstition, unexamined assumptions, and self-serving delusions we stand empty handed at the edge of a great wilderness. We respect the past and the well-intentioned teachers we’ve known. But we start fresh.

We start walking.

And if we are willing enough the entire universe conspires in our favor. The right books, the right people, and the right situations show up just when we need them most. They shine light on the tender shoots of our budding insights, nurture our dawning realizations, encourage our virtues, and embolden our convictions. Sometimes this divine assistance manifests as loss and destruction. Old forms are torn asunder to release the energy and raw materials necessary for the miracles ahead.

Wisdom knows a lot about letting go. Soon enough, we do too. As our old understandings (which were just opinions anyway) turn to ash, we are freed to see anew. The world opens up to us as a beautiful, grace-filled place of abundance and healing. Even our sorrow slips into its rightful place in the grand unfolding. We stop craving pleasure and distraction. It is enough to breathe, and be a part of it all. How could we ask for more? We come to gradually know, not in our minds, but in our bones, that we are O.K., and that this is enough.

Wisdom Incorporated

We had it wrong all along. We mistakenly believed that wisdom was a kind of knowledge, a cadre of secrets that would solve our riddles and cure our confusions. We can be forgiven for this naiveté. How can the unwise know what wisdom is?

            Through direct experience we come to know the simple truth – wisdom is not advice, or rules, or someone else’s idea of the good life. Wisdom is a lived realization that defies expression. We can sing about it, dance about it, point at it with painting, film, poetry, and music. But whatever “it” is, it eludes our conceptual grasp. We cannot think wisdom, we can only be wisdom.

            When we incorporate wisdom, that is, hold it in our corporeal form, we embody it and feel its thrum in all of our energy systems – the wisdom of digestion, the wisdom of perception, the wisdom of cognition, the wisdom of emotion, the wisdom of intuition, the wisdom of loving-kindness, the wisdom of willingness, the wisdom of pain, the wisdom of healing, the wisdom of action, the wisdom of reciprocity – in short, the wisdom of our inter-being. For we are not alone. Our being is everything’s being. We exist in a continuum of causation that entwines all consciousness, matter, and energy – what the theistic religions call God. But no matter what your faith-family of origin or current belief system, the fruit of wisdom is the same – a well-lived life.

            Wisdom doesn’t mean you have all the answers. But you move more graciously through the questions. Wisdom doesn’t set you free from the pain of being alive. But it teaches you that suffering is optional. Wisdom doesn’t set you above anyone else, in fact, it destroys all hierarchies. Wisdom doesn’t make you rich. But it shifts your understanding of wealth and success. Wisdom doesn’t make you clever and powerful. But it sharpens your mastery in the midst of a deep acceptance of the messiness of life.

            Letting go of the notion that wisdom is a thing to be coveted and grasped, we are free to move into its influence, the way a sailboat finds favorable wind when it heads in the right direction. Loose hand on the tiller, eyes on the horizon, and joy in the heart – this is the wisdom incorporated.