What Am I Looking For?

By Rahasya Poe

in the Lotus Guide magazine

"What am I looking for" and "Who am I" are probably the two most frequently asked questions among spiritual searchers. Of course we soon find that the answer to both questions is one and the same. Some of history's foremost thinkers have given us clues to aid in our search. Socrates said, "Know thyself." His discussions among the young aristocratic citizens of Athens aimed to constantly question their unwarranted confidence in the truth of popular opinions. Of course, the society in which he lived sentenced him to death, but this questioning is an important step in any transformational process.

Then there was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters to what lies within us." Or we can look at people such as Carl Jung, who said, "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." Obviously, I could write a book on such people and what they had to say about where to look. The trouble is that books have been written, and we do read them, but we're caught in a trap called the mind. The situation we often find ourselves in is one in which our minds feel trapped, or in prison, and we reach out to other minds to find a means of escape. This is the point at which a well-meaning psychiatrist comes to our cell and rearranges our furniture, so we're more comfortable, and gives us some pills so we go back to sleep. But many of us want to be free, even if it's uncomfortable at first, which it usually is.

Part of the problem comes when we lose sight of the fact that we see the world egocentrically. We see the world as revolving around us as individuals. Once, a disciple asked his master, "Master, what is the difference between you and me?" The master answered, "There's only one difference. You see yourself in the world and I see the world in myself." Another problem arises from living in a polarized reality, a reality in which we see right and wrong, good and bad, up and down, and in and out. But as the great physicist Neils Bohr once said, "The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."

So if we know this, why isn't it the catalyst for true transformation in our lives? Why do we endlessly search in books and sacred places for the truth, only to find that we've answered one question and found 10 more plunging us even deeper into confusion and dismay? Could the answer be a conceptual one? Even though St. Francis of Assisi has been given credit for it, the Sufis have been telling us for centuries that, "What we are looking for, is what's doing the looking."

For many years we have thought that we are the thinker and indeed, our essential nature is based around thinking--"I think, therefore I am"--but this philosophy comes from a time when we became a truly mechanistic world. And as we are starting to see, we are destroying our world precisely because we have fragmented it and ourselves into parts of a whole. We have come to "think" of ourselves as "encapsulated egos," as Alan Watts would put it. When we do this we see ourselves and the world as separate entities and events and not as a process that involves everything and everyone else in life; we become destructive to the world--and why not, it's "not us." So in a sense, we are changing our concept of self and it might be more correct to say, "I think, therefore I'm not," because we are not the thinker, we are the watcher, the witness of our lives.

In the end, it seems as though we have attempted to escape from ourselves once again, only to find that no matter where we go . . . there we are. Except that now, with more consciousness, we see that it's not just us, it's all of us, even the very least of us. So during our search, remember,

"What I'm looking for, is what's doing the looking."

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