Whole

Seeking is one of the stages of being. When a child attempts to crawl for the first time, or reaches for something, or reaches for everything that is just beyond its grasp … this instinct comes from our curious nature, which gets elevated to spiritual ends, in our search for God or the universe within or higher power or whatever/whomever we may call it - that which some believe gives life, for those who believe.

It can happen that one realizes there is no actual seeking to do, or rather that there is nothing to find. However, it is hard to ‘arrive’ here (if it is an actual arriving) without having first done some seeking … and this is a bit of a puzzle. Why do we need to seek to stop seeking, or to realize that our seeking wasn’t necessary? It’s like we have to look until we get to the place of not-looking, because there is nothing to be found but ourselves, and we are the seeker, and we are already there/here. There is not a finding but a re-discovering that one is already whole and complete, that one is not missing anything.

Speaking to the separation from the greater energy, the longing or loneliness of feeling oneself cut off from the universe, may ebb and flow as one feels more or less connected to the All. But it does not take away from ones’ essential wholeness, ones’ essential completeness, the true state of being into which we were all born, with nothing to add, nothing to take away, that we all had at birth and will carry to death and perhaps beyond. Whether this wholeness points to being part of the Universe and sensing that as a stronger force is irrelevant.

Intellectualizing that any further is unnecessary. Wholeness is enough at the moment. Whether in enlightenment terms, that realization is seen as first base and not a home run, that might just be where I am personally ‘at’, developmentally, and there is more to ‘get’.

For now, as someone who has suffered the falseness of a supposed missing piece, and that something or someone could fill that gap, knowing that I am already full just as I am and don’t need anything else is already such a state of grace and relief that I’m happy to float here for awhile and see what else comes up, whenever it does or doesn’t choose to come up. But this kind of thinking can be dangerous, because then enlightenment becomes something to ‘get’, and that is not at all the case. The spiritual mountain may in itself be a trick of the mind, the concept that we must climb and actively be doing something, when actually we are already at the top, because there is no mountain.

The typical pointer to love and especially romantic love as a way to feel whole without any climbing is tempting. If wholeness can be triggered through the love of another person, our work is done for us. But essentially that just proves our incompleteness all over again, putting us back to where we started.

Idealized love means we can just go bumbling through life and then this outside thing happens to us, and bam, we are complete. It is as if our incompleteness was a necessary waiting game, and then poof, we are fixed. This is the stuff of fiction, and not at all true. If two people who don’t understand their intrinsic wholeness then come together, hoping to fill their emptiness with each other, it is just a recipe for more experiences of incompleteness, now with extra fuel to the fire, in the form of expectation that the other person will make up the difference, which can of course never be fulfilled. And yet, we’ve based much of arts and literature and music on this fallacy. It is very dangerous. I am the first to champion love, but fear I’ve been doing it for all the wrong reasons. I really thought it could replace everything, and most of all, replace the bit that I thought was missing in myself. Which isn’t missing.

The idea of romantic love as a path to enlightenment or wholeness is just one of many false spiritual cure-alls, and it happens to be an extremely strong and pervading myth of our times. The concept of twin souls or soul mates and the implied separation and reconnection in that has caused a great deal of suffering, for those that have not ‘found’ that person, and believe that to be the meaning of life, and for those who have ‘found’ that person, the slippery slope of a pedestal with a very high place to fall from.

If belief is seen as married to doubt, then the following of a faith or doctrine as a thing outside of oneself which will bring wholeness is just as dangerous. If God is seen as something intrinsically separate, it only serves to reinforce our separation. Faith is then seen as a life-preserver that we must hold onto to not drown in the sea of life, and in that we are not relying on ourselves to do the navigating. I do not posit that there is no God, or we are alone, quite the contrary, that in our wholeness we are absolutely connected to everything, which means that God is neither inside us nor outside us, and with our very being, faith or trust is not necessary because life is the proof of everything. We are here, and that is enough. When we point to God in church, we are actually pointing to ourselves, to our own existence.

On a personal note, having found my own wholeness, I can share that with others, and help them to recognize at least intellectually that such a thing exists, and has existed all along. If we remove the sense that any one person can complete another – which assumes falsely that one is born incomplete, then we must also look at the notion of complementing, for to compliment is to supply something with the other lacks, and essentially implies the same meaning. What are we left with, then? Relating is a start, to have or establish reciprocal relationships, of separate and whole beings coming together.

I do not attempt to project this singular moment in which I understood my own wholeness onto the whole of human nature. Just like the animals on one island who started to use a rudimentary tool to open a nut or fruit, others followed suit on another island, and that happens with human experience as well, so I am making the assumption that if this has happened to me, it has happened to others as well.

“The richness of not wanting wrote these poems” – Kabir, Love Poems from God

Waiting is resistance hard at work. Because it implies a state of not having, and the drudgery of patience while one is in that place of lack. It is resistance to the most simple of truths – wholeness. It is not sexy or exciting in itself, although the initial moments of release from the pain and exhaustion of looking can feel like ecstasy, if momentarily. Separation collapses, and it can’t really be put back together again, because it wasn’t real to begin with. It is the illusion that collapses, the yearning that has itself as the object beings to fall apart – the wanting to want loses its power. This is a surge for the one no longer seeking, because all of that power had been given away in the search. There is so much more energy to tap into once the searching is deemed unnecessary. With nothing to do but give it away, nothing to do but share it, to be in the wholeness and enjoy it, because it is a gift that we’ve all been given. It is our birthright - wholeness, completeness, just as we are, nothing to add or take away.