Chapter 2, Lesson 2: Seeking

Welcome to Chapter 2, Lesson 2 of Finding Your Way.  The topic of this lesson is the movement of seeking.  Unlike hiding, clinging and shattering, which all involve turning away from growth, seeking is the only movement in which you are consciously choosing towards personal growth.  

The movement of seeking is characterized by certain key attributes:

• Flexibility - a willingness to keep your expectations and worldview agile and adaptable

• Inquiry - a willingness to question, and never take any understanding on its face

• Openness - a willingness to try new experiences and adopt new frames by which to understand reality

Moving with seeking means understanding that we never have all of the answers, and each moment can be an opportunity to learn more.   It does not mean blindly accepting whatever we read or are told. And it does not mean clinging to any of our current beliefs as an ultimate truth.   As with all movements, a movement of seeking can be more or less skillful.  An unskillful seeking lacks careful discernment, leading to recklessness or a naive approach, whereas skillful seeking means integrating what resonates and setting aside the rest.

Notice your orientation towards your seeking. If you feel driven or compelled, that is your mind doing the seeking, rather than your true Self.

Avoid putting yourself into the future towards some imagined goal, when you seek. You can be open and flexible now, since now is all there ever is. There is nothing unwholesome in having a goal. The key is to not make the goal the thing you are doing the seeking for, but instead see it as one of the fruits of the journey. The journey is also a destination.

Seeking does not mean charging ahead recklessly or past our point of discomfort and fear.  We can seek as slowly as is comfortable.  The important thing is not the speed of movement, but the general orientation towards flexibility, inquiry and openness — a willingness to learn and grow. 

So how do we cultivate seeking in our lives?  We keep our psychological focus in the present, and not in the past and the future.  We notice the moments of discomfort before we react to them, and we stay with the discomfort equanimously until it has integrated.  This helps to avoid shattering, which often leads to hiding or clinging.  When we do shatter and fall into a karma, we can orient towards recognizing those situations and considering the things that triggered the shattering, so that we can cultivate equanimity with respect to those triggers and thereby heal them.  

When we notice that we are hiding or clinging, we similarly look at the situation that gave rise to those movements from an attitude of inquiry, without chastising ourselves for any perceived failures.  One of the key aspects of healthy seeking is doing so with an attitude of playfulness and inquiry.  If your inner critic is firing off telling you everything you are doing wrong, you are being deeply unkind to yourself.  Being hard on yourself serves no purpose and is not in alignment with the virtue of Karuna - compassion for suffering, which includes your own suffering.

I am now going to give you the first of six transmissions in this Chapter.  Each of these transmissions is a magic derived from the Cosmic Creator attainment, which you will receive in Chapter 15.  They will each help you to perceive a particular movement more clearly, and collectively will help you to better understand where your own movements are in alignment with seeking, or where there are elements of hiding, clinging, or shattering in your actions and thoughts.  

Here is the transmission:

{Perceive Seeking as Seeking}

Spend some time after this lesson paying attention to your own movements, and try to see how often you are legitimately seeking, and how often you are hiding, clinging or shattering in some respect.  You may be surprised at how often you move in a way other than seeking without even realizing it.

In the next lesson, we’ll take a deep dive into the movement of hiding.  Until then and always, be well.