Slow Death of the Seeker
When I observe the world and its characters, it seems everyone is after something. Even those who seem to have moved beyond the superficial goals of the common culture are still in pursuit. Contributing, creating, expressing, manifesting … becoming. Seeking. Call it by any name you want, it ultimately begins and ends with the same conclusion. This isn’t it.
Eventually, we may come to realize the bankruptcy of our ways and begin to question the need for seeking altogether. We conclude that seeking would best be dropped, and thus we make silent vows to ourselves to let go, and may even fool ourselves into thinking we’ve succeeded. But sooner or later we realize our folly. We notice ourselves grasping at our goal, seeking non-seeking. What a cosmic joke this movement becomes!
All the while, a curious thing happens beneath the surface. Some kind of mysterious physical manifestation takes root, and begins to burn the seeker away through a process of internal combustion. This slow death is paradoxically painful, agonizing, and frustrating, as well as blissful and beautiful. Right down the the last cell of the body. Many have tried putting the experience into words, but it cannot possibly be explained. Each surrender seems so final, and yet the barely detectable remnants of the seeker remain, maintaining some identification of the me in all of this, the continuity holding it all together.
More and more, the fatigue of failure and holding on begin to wear us down, to erode us ever so slowly, like a rock at the bottom of a flowing river. One day, finally we give up, realizing that we are helplessly and hopelessly lost.
Now what?!?
This is where the real mystery begins …
I’ve looked under chairs
I’ve looked under tables
I’ve tried to find the key
To fifty million fablesThey call me The Seeker
I’ve been searching low and high
I won’t get to get what I’m after
Till the day I die-Pete Townshend