Spiritual Chase

An excerpt from Deepak Chopra's "The Book of Secrets".

Seeking is a word often applied to the spiritual path, and many people are proud to call themselves seekers. Often, they are the same people who once chased too hard after money, sex, alcohol, or work. With the same addictive intensity they now hope to find God, the soul, the higher self. The problem is that seeking begins with a false assumption. I don't mean the assumption that materialism is corrupt and spirituality is pure. Yes, materialism can become all-consuming, but that's not the really important point. Seeking is doomed because it is a chase that takes you outside yourself.

Whether the object is God or money makes no real difference. Productive seeking requires that you throw out all assumptions that there is a prize to be won. This means acting without hope of rising to some ideal self, hope being a wish that you'll get somewhere better than the place you started from. You are starting from yourself, and it's the self that contains all the answers. So you have to give up on the idea that you must go from A to B. There is no linear path when the goal isn't somewhere else. You must also discard fixed judgments about high and low, good and evil, holy and profane. The one reality includes everything in its tangle of experiences, and what we are trying to find is the experiencer who is present no matter what experience you are having.

Looking at the people who race around trying to be models of goodness, someone coined the apt phrase "spiritual materialism," the transfer of values that work in the material world over to the spiritual world.

I'd like to add that the limitation of language creates fear of the unknown. What words failed to explain and our minds failed to analyse and understand; we reject. Because to venture somewhere which is unheard of requires undaunted courage and ceaseless effort. Very often we don't look inside because we don't understand at all what it means to search within. It is much easier to look outside. To see what our parents did and we deem to be wrong or right. What our neighbours commited as gossips and invasion into our privacy. If our cousin married a pilot or she married a farmer. We imitate what others do and behave how society tells us to. We all subject ourselves to common sense. But then common sense is what everyone COMMONLY agrees to be a correct standard.

With this attitude we jump from worldly matters like money, status, power and sex to what we believe as a spiritual path. In either situations we forget the taste of bread, the sound of water and the smell of flowers. The experience of being alive. Because we indulge. A person who appreciates life from within and places close to his heart the hidden forces behind what words can speak is more spiritual than one who prays umpteen times a day and recites mantras for 30 years.

Let me share with you another quote from Dr. Deepak Chopra :

"...Christ wasn't a Christian and that Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't Muslim..."