Little Tail

True Nature

To extricate ourselves from this thicket of pride, we must awaken, or rather reawaken, a quality of our True Nature – spiritual yearning. Spiritual yearning is based on an intuition of the Eternal Love and Indestructible Happiness inherent in Consciousness Itself. Deep in our hearts we know that this Love and this Happiness exist. Whether we have been aware of it or not, this is what we have been searching for all our lives.

The trouble is, up until now we have been willing to settle for lesser delights. As worldly seekers, we were fixated on the transitory pleasures of worldly life. Then, as spiritual seekers, we became enchanted by the greater but equally ephemeral consolations that spiritual life brings. If, however, we now allow our deepest yearning for the Ultimate to burn freely in our souls, then we will see that everything we have experienced so far is nothing compared to that shoreless OCEAN of LOVE and HAPPINESS which is our true birthright and to which our hearts most truly incline.

But the question still remains, how to attain it? Apparently, all our struggles on the path have been for naught. Just when we thought we had conquered the ego once and for all, we discovered that it has outfoxed us. Although this realization shatters our pride, it also leaves us feeling more helpless than ever. Having exhausted every ounce of our energy, there seems nothing left to do but concede defeat and abandon the struggle. And so that’s just what we begin to do.

For many seekers, this can be a devastating experience – a kind of “spiritual death,” as many mystics have described it. But then, even as we die, we may notice something quite surprising happens. The more we cease to struggle, the more it seems, does the ego! It’s as though we have been wrestling with our own shadow all along – which, indeed, we have – so that now that we are dying, our shadow is dying with us. And if we can surrender to this process unconditionally, when our sense of being a separate self vanishes completely, lo and behold, we find that our ego vanishes as well!

With the disappearance of self and ego, the way is finally cleared for the Supreme Realization that, from the very beginning, neither has ever truly existed. All that ever was, is, and will be is Consciousness Itself. This is who you REALLY ARE! And to know this is ENLIGHTENMENT!

Looking back, however, we may still ask a final question: If there never was an ego or a seeker, what was the purpose of all this spiritual combat?

From the Ultimate point of view, of course, it was quite unnecessary. And yet, from a relative point of view, the whole purpose of the path has been to get the seeker to surrender seeking. For it is the very activity of seeking that creates the illusion of a ‘seeker.’ And, while all forms of seeking for something can be surrendered in favor of seeking Enlightenment, the one thing the seeker can never voluntarily surrender is seeking itself, because trying to do so places the seeker in the paradoxical position of seeking to surrender seeking. So the final act of surrender must, in a sense, be forced. And this is what the spiritual path is designed to bring about – a situation in which the seeker is left with no choice but to surrender.

Seen from this perspective then, all the struggles required of the seeker by the spiritual path are not only necessary to its ultimate success – they are themselves actual manifestations of the Infinite Wisdom, Clarity, and Compassion of our own True Nature as Consciousness Itself, which is even now calling us to Awaken…to Awaken!