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Stop seeking Truth, instead recognize the Ego

I can only tell you the ways you cannot arrive at the Truth, and when you have found all the ways by which you cannot arrive at the Truth, you will find the Truth: then it will be yours, and not another’s which is but an imitation.
– Beyond the Himalayas

There is no necessity to seek the Truth, what is necessary is to seek what blocks you from the Truth. (ed)
– Your Immortal Reality

My wise meditation teacher loves to hear about problems a meditator faced rather than what the meditator wanted to share to impressed him. To him, it is by understanding defilements can wisdom arise. Wisdom is hidden away due to defilements. That brought me succinctly to question why when a master finally arrive at his/her own enlightenment, he shares the Truth with the world.  Why the word “Truth”? Why not something else like Nature, Universe or what not? It came to my realization that the Truth is the opposite of False. There is a high possibility that what they thought they knew before came as a realization that they are all false, lies and fabrications and thus their need to share what is truly understood by them as Truth. Quantum physics call it optical illusion.

When we start to question the purpose of life at some point in time, we tend to incline ourselves to a specific faith or religion, to seek the Truth. Here lies the irony. When we seek the Truth by imitating what we should and should not do, we moved ourselves further away from understanding the nature of existence, from Truth, so to speak. We imitate what great masters have shared instead of learning to understand what they are trying to convey. So instead of moving closer to Truth, we are in fact moving further from Truth.

It is not the cause of the religionist, neither is it the fault of the seeker. What is more true is the nature of ego is to blind. Remember the quote mentioned by Yeshua? I stood in the world and found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. They came into the world empty, and they seek to leave the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, they will open their eyes.

And there are those, while still seeking, goes spiritual shopping. Chogyam Truangpa labels it as spiritual materialism. You can never win the ego! except to recognize them when it arise. That reminds me of what Yeshua has to said:

A wise fisherman cast his net into the sea. When he drew it up it was full of little fish. Among them, he discovered a large, fine fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and he chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears should listen.

If you don’t fully comprehend the verse, let me share with you a parable by the wise Rumi, adapted by Osho, another wise soul:

One day Jalaluddin Rumi took all his students, disciples and devotees  to a field. That was his way to teach them things of the beyond, through the examples of the world. He was not a theoretician, he was a very practical man. The disciples were thinking, “What could be the message, going to that faraway field… and why can’t he say it here?”

But when they reached the field, they understood that they were wrong and he was right. The farmer seemed to be almost an insane man. He was digging a well in the field – and he had already dug eight incomplete wells.

He would go a few feet and then he would find that there was no water. Then he would start digging another well… and the same story was continued. He had destroyed the whole field and he had not yet found water.

The master, Jalaluddin Rumi, told his disciples, “Can you understand something? If this man had been total and had put his whole energy into only one well, he would have reached to the deepest sources of water long ago.

But the way he is going he will destroy the whole field and he will never be able to make a single well. With so much effort he is simply destroying his own land, and getting more and more frustrated, disappointed: what kind of a desert has he purchased? It is not a desert, but one has to go deep to find the sources of water.”

He turned to his disciples and asked them, “Are you going to follow this insane farmer? Sometimes on one path, sometimes on another path, sometimes listening to one, sometimes listening to another… you will collect much knowledge, but all that knowledge is simply junk, because it is not going to give you the enlightenment you were looking for. It is not going to lead you to the waters of eternal life.”

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Respond and React

I used to get pretty confused by these two definitions, seeing them as similar and yet been reminded repeatedly they are totally different. The answers I got did not fulfill my needs, and so the mind is consistently on the alert trying to understand the two.

Inquisitiveness is one of the characteristic of wisdom and thus when a question is posed to the mind, it will naturally incline to a solution, without me needing to give it an answer. By giving it an answer I am only resolving the question at the same level where it comes from, making the question seems meaningless.

And it only dawn upon me recent in the retreat that both respond and reaction are indeed different. But before I come into defining them I would suggest to see every experience as either a cause or an effect (result). We can’t do anything to the effect as it has already arisen. Neither can we do anything to the cause of that effect. But what we can do is to set a new cause for the effect to take place. Thus to undo a similar situation in the future, it is imperative that we learn to recognize what are the causes to the effect that took place, making us wiser not to repeat it again. On the other hand it is also imperative to recognize what are the cause(s) that brought about joyful effect so that we are able to create or condition them to occur.

Observe that everything which we experience within our sense doors are all effects. They are results of the immediate past for experience to take place. You can also say that the effect is also the cause for another experience to take place in the immediate future. In other words, experience is effect from the past and cause for the future.

Another way of seeing cause and effect is on the subject and object level. If I am the subject, all experiences outside are objects for me to experience. When I am angry, my object is at someone outside there (if I am been triggered by him/her). If my target is on the outside, which is the object, I am reacting to the situation. If my attention is on the inside, which is the subject, I am responding to the situation. Reaction, which we normally referred as irrational, is truly irrational in the sense that it target on the effect – a unworthy action that is pointless. It is like barking on the wrong tree.

On the other hand when I give attention to my anger, I am responding to the cause of the effect, which is truly what I am experiencing, what I am feeling. I can only experience anger but I can’t experience  someone making me angry – the former is a feeling, the latter a thought in the form of a story. When I am responding to the anger, I am no longer in the story or thought, but instead on what is true to me at this moment – I take full responsibility to what is occurring in my space instead of getting someone to be responsible of my anger.

From this observation and understanding which I realized from my recent retreat, I am confident to say that response comes from wisdom, whereas reaction comes from the ego. I finally come to peace with these two words. :)

Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is the one who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death.

– Yeshua

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Opposite Nature is still Nature

The Scorpion and the Sage

One morning, after he had finished his meditation, the old man opened his eyes and saw a scorpion floating helplessly in the water. As the scorpion was washed closer to the tree, the old man quickly stretched himself out on one of the long roots that branched out into the river and reached out to rescue the drowning creature. As soon as he touched it, the scorpion stung him. Instinctively the man withdrew his hand. A minute later, after he had regained his balance, he stretched himself out again on the roots to save the scorpion. This time the scorpion stung him so badly with its poisonous tail that his hand became swollen and bloody and his face contorted with pain. At that moment, a passerby saw the old man stretched out on the roots struggling with the scorpion and shouted: “Hey, stupid old man, what’s wrong with you? Only a fool would risk his life for the sake of an ugly, evil creature. Don’t you know you could kill yourself trying to save that ungrateful scorpion?” The old man turned his head. Looking into the stranger’s eyes he said calmly, “My friend, just because it is the scorpion’s nature to sting, that does not change my nature to save.”

Jalaluddin Rumi (retold by Osho)

It is the nature of the ego to make you forget yourself, and it is the nature of wisdom or holy spirit to make you  remember. Either you are aware or you are not aware. The more you remember to be aware the more you see yourself truly.