Why Do We Suffer?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding”

For most of my life, I was a very sad and lonely little me, a depressed wave in the cosmic ocean of life, feeling totally separate from that ocean, deeply at war with myself and with others, never experiencing a moment’s rest. For many years, I tried desperately to fit in, to succeed, to connect with others, to find love, to find my place in the world, but despite my best efforts, I fell into a deeper and deeper depression. I blamed everything and everyone for the way I felt—my genes, my brain chemistry, my upbringing, my parents, my friends, my boss, the cruelty of life, our money-obsessed society, the media, meat eaters, politicians, corporations, the “evildoers.” My misery had nothing to do with me, or so I believed. It was the only possible response to a life that had turned against me. Life was cruel, life was unfair, life was unkind, life had cursed me. I blamed life for my misery, and I felt that I had every right to. “If you’d experienced what I’ve experienced, you’d feel this way too!”—that’s how I liked to justify my misery to others.

Life had not lived up to my expectations, other people had let me down, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t control the way my life was going. As a result, I had ended up in bed, unable to get up, feeling suicidal, nauseous, and weighed down, unable and unwilling to face each day. What was the point of getting out of bed? Outside my bedroom door there was just more misery waiting for me. I knew what life was, and I wanted to avoid it at all costs. Life was pain, and I didn’t want to experience pain.

How had I ended up like this? To put it very simply, over the course of my life, I had built up many ideas about how life should be. I had collected many beliefs about reality, many assumptions about the way things really were, many concepts about what should and shouldn’t happen in the world. I had come to many conclusions about what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil, what was normal and what was abnormal, what was proper and what was improper.

And I had many images of myself that I had been trying to uphold, many demands regarding how I wanted to be seen and how I wanted to see myself. I wanted to see myself, and to be seen, as successful and attractive and intelligent and kind and good and compassionate and talented. But life kept getting in the way of these demands. Life simply wouldn’t let me be who I wanted to be. Life just didn’t understand me. People just didn’t get me. Nobody would ever understand me! My frustrated expectations of life and my constant judgments of myself brought pain, and I hated the pain and didn’t want to experience it any longer.

However, in my mid-twenties, through a series of ever-deepening insights, I came to see clearly that my depression, at the most basic level, was actually the experience of my own deep resistance to life. I was not experiencing something outside of myself called depression. Something called depression was not happening to me. I was experiencing my own inner war with the way things were. And at the root of this war was my own ignorance of who I really was. I had stopped seeing the completeness of life; I had forgotten my true nature, and I had gone on the warpath with present experience. Not realizing who I really was, and therefore identifying as a separate “self,” I had gone to war with the present moment.

My depression had everything to do with the way I saw the world—with my judgments of it, with my beliefs about it, with my demands about how this moment should be. Underneath my attempt to control life through thinking was my fear of change, of loss, and, ultimately, of death. My resistance to life took me to the extreme—suicidal depression—but we are all shut off from wholeness to a greater or lesser extent. The degree to which we shut ourselves off from wholeness is the degree to which we suffer. I had shut myself off totally from life, and the suffering had become unbearable. I was a walking corpse, but life had not made me one. I had innocently turned myself into one, in my pursuit of a future wholeness that was never going to come.

At the root of my depression was the sense that I was a separate person—an individual me, an entity separate from life itself and divided from this moment. That individual me had to somehow hold up, support, and sustain something called “my life”—to orchestrate it, to make it go the way I wanted it to, to be in control of it. That’s what I had been taught since I was very young, and that’s what the world had been screaming at me: I was supposed to be in control of my life; I had to know what I wanted and be able to go out and get it. Everyone else seemed to know who they were, what they were doing, where they were going, but I didn’t seem to be able to hold up my story without being crushed by it. My depression was my experience of not being able to hold up my own life, and feeling depressed (pressed down) by my life as a result.

I see now that we are all pressed down by the weight of our own lives, the weight of our history and our imagined futures. In that sense, we are all depressed to some extent! It’s only when it becomes virtually impossible to carry the weight that we call ourselves “depressed” and separate ourselves from others. Although we may not all be clinically depressed, we all walk around with stories about ourselves; we all are trying to make our lives go the way we want them to. And we are all failing on some level to be who we are not.

My suffering took the shape of depression, existential angst, painful shyness, and total lack of intimacy in relationships, but we all suffer in our own way. We all suffer, but either we see suffering as something terrible, to be avoided at all costs, or we see it for what it really is—a clear signpost guiding us back home.

In the midst of my extreme depression another possibility shone through: perhaps my failure to hold up my own life was not actually a disease or a mental illness or a sign of dysfunction or weakness at all. Perhaps this was not my life to hold up in the first place. Perhaps I wasn’t really who I thought I was. Perhaps true freedom had nothing to do with being a better wave in the ocean, with perfecting my story of myself. Perhaps freedom was all about waking up from the dream that we are separate waves in the first place and embracing all that appears in the ocean of present experience. Perhaps that was my job, my true calling in life—to accept present experience deeply, to let go of all ideas of how this moment should be, instead of holding up a false image of myself.

I started to lose interest in pretending to be something I wasn’t. I started to lose interest in resisting the present moment. I started to fall in love with present experience. I discovered the deep acceptance inherent in every thought, every sensation, every feeling, and my suffering came crashing down. I realized that there was nothing wrong with me, and there never had been. And I realized that this was also true for every other human being on the planet.

Human suffering can seem so unfathomable, so unmanageable, so confusing—too huge a problem to tackle. Sometimes suffering seems so meaningless and so inexplicable, or it appears so randomly or so out of the blue that all that’s left is to say, “There must be something wrong with me” or “It’s just the way I am” or “It’s my fate to suffer like this” or “It must be genetic or have to do with my brain chemicals.”

I don’t believe that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with anyone, that anyone has to suffer, that any misery is predestined or built into us in any way.

What I do see is that many people are seeking. They are trying to escape what they think and feel in the moment. They are deeply resisting present experience, but they don’t realize this is what they are doing. So it feels like suffering is just happening to them, almost as if it came from outside of them and they are victims of it. If they did realize the extent of their resistance to the moment, they would no longer have to use all sorts of strange theories to explain or justify their suffering. They would no longer blame life, blame themselves, blame others, or blame circumstances for their suffering. They would no longer blame the alignment of the planets or stars, electromagnetic forces or cosmic energies, their karma, their guru, or God or the devil for their suffering. They would be responsible in the true sense of the word—able to respond to life as it is right now, as opposed to life as they imagine it is or should be.

All my suffering turned out to be a blessing, not a curse. The depression was there to show me—in the most dramatic way possible—how much I was shutting myself off from life. Seen in this way, suffering is always, always a signpost pointing back to wholeness.

It’s often only when we start hurting that we start listening to life. And somehow we are all provided with the exact amount of suffering we need to recognize who we really are. Every wave is a unique expression of the ocean, and every wave will suffer in a unique way. Your suffering is your unique invitation back to the ocean.

My depression was pointing directly to spiritual awakening. My depression (“depressed”) was pointing back to who I really am, which is always deeply at rest (“deep rest”). It was an invitation to let go of my heavy story about the past and future and rest deeply in present experience. It was an invitation to wake up from the dream of separation. It just took me a while to accept that invitation.

Seeing that nothing outside of ourselves really causes our suffering is the key to incredible freedom. Circumstances can never really cause our suffering; it is always in our response to circumstances that we suffer. We suffer only when we seek, when we try to escape certain aspects of our present experience and, in doing so, separate ourselves from life and go to war with ourselves and with others—sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in very subtle ways. Our suffering is rooted in our unwillingness to feel what we feel, to experience what we are experiencing right now. Suffering is there in our war with life as it is. It is there in our failure to see that everything in the moment is always accepted, in the deepest sense.

There is a lot of confusion over the word acceptance, so before we go any further, I want to say a few words about it. One of the first reactions I get from people new to this message is, “Jeff, is your message all about accepting everything—sitting back from life, doing nothing, giving up on the possibility of changing anything? If we simply accept everything that happens, doesn’t that lead to passivity, detachment, inaction, and powerlessness?”

Acceptance doesn’t mean that we should give up all our attempts to prevent bad things happening, as if that were possible. And I’m not saying we should simply sit back and let bad things happen if we can do something about them. Nobody wants their loved ones to get ill. Nobody wants to lose all their money or be injured in a car crash. Nobody wants their partner to walk out on them suddenly. Nobody wants to be physically attacked. But these things happen. Life doesn’t always go according to our plans. Even when we maintain the best of intentions; make the most solid plans; engage in all our positive thinking, prayers, and attempts to manifest our destiny; follow our spiritual paths and promote our spiritual evolution, things happen that we wouldn’t have chosen to happen, and we get to see, time and time again, that ultimately we are not in control of this thing we call life. Even the most so-called enlightened people have ended up in a hospital bed, in tremendous pain from a tumor, asking for more morphine.

What I’m saying is that if we are to be truly free, we must face this reality with open eyes. We must move away from denial, wishful thinking, and hope, and tell the truth about life as it is. Great freedom lies in admitting the truth of this moment, however much it clashes with our hopes, dreams, and plans.

I’m saying that, ultimately, reality itself—not what we think about reality—is the authority. Acceptance is all about seeing reality, seeing things as they actually are, not as we hope or wish them to be. And from that place of total alignment with what is, all creative, loving, and intelligent action flows naturally.

We are constantly judging life. Things happen, and then we approve or disapprove. We accept or reject. We say, “This should have happened” or “That shouldn’t have happened.” We say, “Life is bad” or “Life is good” or “Life is meaningless” or “Life is cruel.” We say, “Life is always kind to me,” or we say, “Life never gives me what I want.” But life itself comes before all of these labels; it comes before all our judgments about life. Life cannot be good or bad. Life is simply life, appearing as all there is, as what we call good and what we call bad. Life “makes the sun shine on the good and bad alike,” as the Bible says. It makes the sun shine, and it is the sun shining, and it is everything the sun shines on, including all the stuff we’d rather the sun didn’t shine on.

Later, I will be talking much more about the true nature of acceptance in this deeper sense. But for now, let’s just say that from a place of deep acceptance of the way things are, in seeing the inherent perfection of life itself, one is still totally free to do what one is moved to do—to help, to change things, to make a difference. It’s just that our actions are no longer coming from the root assumption that reality is broken and needs to be fixed and, underneath that, the assumption that each of us is separate from life. Any movement that comes from the assumption that life is broken will simply perpetuate the disease it promises to cure.

This book is not about sitting back from life and doing nothing; that is detachment, which is another form of separation. This book is about intimacy with all life, which you could say is the death of detachment. A passive attitude toward life is not possible when you realize that you are life itself.

Awakening is not the end of engagement with life—it is just the beginning. Paradoxically, when we realize how perfect life is, how everything happens exactly as it should, we are freer than ever to go out into the world and change things for the better. In seeing how perfect somebody is, exactly as they are, you are freer than ever to help them take a look at what they perceive as imperfection. You’re no longer coming from the root assumption that they are a broken thing that needs fixing. You see that they are already whole. And out of the depths of that realization, you point back to their inherent wholeness. Rooted in wholeness, you are free to fully engage with the dance of apparent separation.

When you’re no longer trying to fix life, perhaps you can be a great help to life. When you’re no longer trying to fix other people, perhaps you can be a great blessing to them. Perhaps true healing happens when you get out of the way.

Perhaps that’s what life needs more than anything—people who no longer see problems, but who see the inseparability of themselves and the world and who fully engage with the world from that place of deep acceptance. Deep acceptance of things as they are and fearless engagement with life are one and the same, however paradoxical that sounds to the rational mind.

COMPLETING OURSELVES IN THE FUTURE

In the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and a son, ragged and starving, travel together across a post-apocalyptic America. The trees and flowers are dying. Most human beings are dead, and a large number of the living have turned to cannibalism. What keeps father and son going is the hope of something better in the future. One of their few possessions is a torn and tattered map. They don’t really know where to go; they only know that they need to head south. They don’t know what they’ll find in the south, or whether there is anything to find there. They just know that they have to keep going south. South has come to represent everything beautiful, good, and true in life.

I won’t give away the plot, but in the end, it turns out that if they had been a little more aware of what was happening along the way, of what life was trying to show them, time and time again, then they wouldn’t have been so eager to reach their destination. In fixating on the destination, they missed the journey, which was where life and love really were.

This story is a wonderful metaphor for how we all live. We are always trying to get there, when here is where all of life is. We are all trying to get home, when perhaps, just perhaps, we are already home, in our present experience, but don’t realize it.

This dynamic plays out in so many of our novels, plays, movies, myths, and spiritual stories. Characters often journey far away from home, discover who they really are, and then return home, somehow changed, somehow the same. In The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most beloved movie of all time, a young girl leaves her colorless home; goes on an incredible, colorful journey; meets various facets of herself; and returns to the same place—only then she sees what’s really there. Home has not changed, but her eyes have opened to it. At the beginning of many Disney musicals, the main character, feeling like an outcast in their own home, will sing a song about their longing for adventure, for love, for something they can’t seem to get at home. That something calls them away, but in the end, they return home, or they find a new home—their true home, their true place in the world. It has been suggested that on the most basic level every story shares this common structure: our hero moves from the known to the unknown, but he always returns home in the end. The spiritual seeker leaves home in search of enlightenment and returns home again only to discover that the enlightenment he sought was there from the beginning.

In music, notes and chords go on a similar journey, moving away from their natural homes, creating tension for the captivated listener, but finally resolving themselves by returning to their starting points. And we, the listeners, feel like the music moved us in some way, taking us on a journey away from the ordinary and returning us—somehow changed, touched, transformed—to where we were. We were moved, even though we didn’t move at all.

We feel compelled to leave home in search of whatever it is that will make us feel complete, but we also feel equally compelled to return home. After a long, exhausting day at kindergarten or at the office, we just want to go home—back to mother and father, back to our loved ones, back to sleep. As children, we get homesick when we are away from home for too long, away from the ones we love. When people die, we say they have “gone home” or found a new home where they can rest eternally, and finally be at peace.

Throughout all human history, the search for home has expressed itself in every single facet of our lives—in our art, our music, our science, our mathematics, our literature, our philosophy, our quest for love, our spirituality. The search for home goes very, very deep in the human psyche.

In art, the interplay of the seeker and the sought, foreground and background, light and shade, positive and negative space creates tension, drama. A joke seeks a punch line. A sentence seeks completion. It is our built-in longing for resolution that makes a piece of art, a joke, a sentence so compelling, so dramatic, so satisfying. Perhaps it is that same longing that has driven mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, for all human history, to seek some kind of grand, unified, all-encompassing theory of reality, to find wholeness in the chaos, to find love in the midst of devastation, to find cosmic closure. We are told that even the universe is expanding and contracting—somehow seeking equilibrium, seeking home. All things long to come to rest.

Home is not a place, a thing, or a person. It is rest. At its root, the word home means “to rest” or “to lie down.”

We are like waves in the ocean, longing to return to the ocean that we never left. A wave experiences itself as separate from the ocean and, from that place of primal misidentification, begins to seek the ocean, in a million different ways. It is seeking itself and doesn’t realize it. Its longing for home is its longing for itself. This is the human condition.

How does this sense of separateness manifest in our present experience? Well, we live with that nagging feeling that something is missing from our lives, don’t we? It’s a feeling of lack, a strange empty feeling, like there’s a hole in us that needs to be filled up, like we are not good enough as we are, like there is something fundamentally wrong with us. It’s out of this basic sense of emptiness that we go off into the world of time and space in search of our true home, in search of cosmic rest, in search of relief, in search of the fullness of things. We seek fulfillment, the filling-up of emptiness. In our cosmic homesickness, we seek union with God, with Spirit, with nature, with a guru. We seek full bellies and full bank accounts. Feminine and masculine seek each other, trying to complete themselves through union; we seek our soul mates, our other halves who will complete us. We seek our destiny, not realizing that we are already living it.

Out of a basic sense of incompleteness, we begin our search for a future completeness. Not recognizing our true identity as the ocean of present experience, we begin to seek that ocean, and we truly believe that we will find it in the future, in the “one day.” We say to ourselves, “I am incomplete now, but one day, once I’ve found what I’m looking for, I’ll be complete.”

“One day I’ll find love, and then I’ll be complete. One day I’ll become spiritually enlightened, and then I’ll be complete. One day I’ll be a success, and then I’ll be complete. One day I’ll be rich. One day I’ll get healed. One day they’ll approve of me. One day I’ll be fully present. One day I’ll be completely conscious. One day I’ll be living in the Now. One day I’ll find peace. One day I’ll be fully myself. One day I’ll be understood. One day I’ll be a star. One day they’ll love and accept me. One day I’ll be fully spiritually evolved. One day I’ll be a father or a mother. One day I’ll be free. One day I’ll be happy. Yes, I’ll be complete, one day. But not yet. Not yet.”

We seek wealth, power, love, success, and enlightenment in the future, in the “one day,” because these things symbolize home to us. We think that getting what we want, finding what we are looking for, will take us home. Our cosmic homesickness is the root of everything.

Sometimes we even get what we want—the new car, the new relationship, the new job, the slim and toned body, the new spiritual experience, the fame, the adulation, the success. And we feel whole and complete for a while. But soon that empty, unfulfilled feeling returns, and the seeking starts up again. It’s as if there is something in us that is perpetually unsatisfied with what is; it always wants more. No matter how much it gets, it wants more. No matter how much it owns, or achieves, or possesses, it wants more. No matter how many experiences it has, no matter how much it adds to itself, it wants more.

No matter how complete the story of my life is, it could always be more complete. The job could always pay more; the relationship could always be more fulfilling; I could always have more money, more success, more adulation. The spiritual experience could always be deeper, longer. I could always be closer to enlightenment or more enlightened, more present, more conscious, more free, more loved. Or there could be less of what I don’t want—less pain, less fear, less sadness, less anger, less suffering, less ego, fewer thoughts. The story of my life will never be complete, which is to say, I will never complete myself in time.

I knew a man who was a millionaire before he was forty. He worked hard and got what he always wanted—more money than he could ever need; a big, luxurious house; a beautiful, loving partner; adorable, intelligent, obedient, hard-working kids; lots of friends; adulation; respect. He retired at thirty-seven. Quite literally the day after he retired, he was sitting alone at home, and suddenly that empty, incomplete, homesick feeling resurfaced—the same feeling he had felt as a teenager, the same feeling that had driven him to work himself nearly to death in order to make his millions, the same feeling he had spent his life trying to escape. It was the feeling that the money, the big house, the wife, and the family were supposed to take away. That’s what the world had promised.

Now he had a big problem. He had what he wanted, and he still wasn’t complete. He still felt homesick. What was wrong with him? Well, now he didn’t have the distraction of work. Now, faced again with the lack, he had no way of escaping it.

That evening, the young millionaire took a drink. And another. And another. Very soon he was dependent on the drinks. His addiction to work was replaced with an addiction to alcohol. After all, his sense of cosmic lack had to be obliterated somehow.

This man’s story is the perfect example of how the seeker cannot be satisfied, even when it gets what it wants. The basic sense of lack we experience cannot be removed by anything in the world of time and space. Getting what you want does not take away your primal homesickness.

And there is another problem, one the Buddhists have always known: in a world that is totally impermanent, in a world of flux and change, in a world that is ultimately beyond your control, even if you do get what you want, you can then lose what you have. Ultimately, there is no security in life. What appears always disappears.

We know, deep down, that nothing, absolutely nothing, can protect us from the possibility of losing what we have, and this is why we experience so much anxiety in our lives. Now that we have the new house, we worry about losing our job and not being able to keep up payments. Now that we have plenty of money in our bank account, we worry about the economy collapsing and our savings being wiped out. However happy you are in your relationship with your partner, you worry about her leaving you, getting ill, or worse. You worry about your kids being hurt. You worry about your own body, about all the things that could go wrong with it. And you know that nothing—not your big house, the furniture, the fancy car, the swimming pool, all of that money in your bank account, not even your beloved spiritual guru—can protect you from loss, from change, from flux, from the way of things.

Sure, people and objects can give you the temporary feeling of security, comfort, and pleasure, but they cannot give you what you really long for—which is freedom from all loss, freedom from lack, and ultimately freedom from death. They cannot give you the cosmic security you crave; they cannot bring you home. Nothing outside of yourself can bring you home.

Here’s another way of thinking about our search for home. Imagine you’re a newborn baby. You’ve never seen the world before; everything is unfamiliar and mysterious to you. All of those strange sights, sounds, and smells! All of those strange feelings and sensations that you have no name for yet! You wake up in the middle of the night. You’re alone and hungry and scared (although you don’t have words for any of these feelings yet). On some level you feel not okay, and you have no way of communicating this except through crying and screaming. You can’t say, “Excuse me! I don’t feel okay! Please come to my aid, someone!” You can only scream and wait for help to come.

Your mother comes in and holds you and soothes you and feeds you. Suddenly, everything feels okay again. Suddenly, the discomfort doesn’t seem so bad. The fear doesn’t seem so bad. You are no longer alone. You feel safe again. You feel protected by forces outside yourself. Your not okay has turned to okay. Something outside of you came and made things okay again.

If the baby could talk he or she might say something like this: “When the not okay feeling comes, I scream. Eventually Mummy comes, and then the not okay goes away, like magic. Mummy takes away the not okay. Mummy makes the not okay go away.”

But it wasn’t really Mother who made things okay. Mother doesn’t really have the power to take away the not okay feelings—that’s just what it must seem like to a newborn baby. It’s a beautiful illusion—that objects, people, or anything outside of ourselves can make us okay, can bring us home. We very quickly start to believe that looking for something outside of ourselves eventually will take away all the bad thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The seeking mechanism is set up, probably from a very early age. We look outside of ourselves for something to make things okay. Perhaps our attachment to our mothers is the first expression of our seeking. But it’s not really Mother that we are attached to—it is home. For most babies, I would imagine that their mother is the first person who symbolizes home.

I wonder if, in a million different ways, with all our seeking, we’re just trying to get back to the womb, the place of non-separation. In the womb, there was no separation between me and the womb, no separation between me and Mother. There was simply wholeness, without an inside or outside. In the womb, there was no “other.” In other words, everything was the womb. It’s like the whole world was there, the whole universe was there, just to take care of me, just to protect me. I was embraced in an ocean of love, always. It was home, without opposite, because in the womb I had no conception of inside and outside. It was the ocean in which every single wave of experience was deeply, deeply accepted. It was myself.

In fact, I wasn’t even in the womb—I was the womb. That’s how complete it was. It was not me and the womb (two things); it was just the womb (one thing, everything). And so, in truth, I did not come out of the womb. In my deepest essence, I was—and am—the womb. I am the wholeness that I long for.

But from this place of total, ever-present completeness with no opposite, it seems as though I was ejected without warning. Suddenly, all of that effortless security was gone. Suddenly, I was faced with a world of things, a world of separate objects, a contingent world, a place where comfort, security, and safety—okayness—could appear and disappear at any moment. It was no longer a world of permanent okayness. It was now a world where okayness battled with not-okayness.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that since every human being that exists or that has ever existed has at one time been in the womb, we may all still carry a vague, preverbal memory of a deep sense of okayness, and we may all have a yearning to return there. Perhaps our search for home is also our search for the womb—not the physical location, but the wholeness that was there. We long to feel safe, protected, at one with everything. We long to be deeply okay again.

As adults, we no longer literally scream for our mothers; instead, we seek relief from discomfort in more sophisticated ways. We metaphorically scream for the next cigarette, the next drink, the next sexual conquest, the next job promotion, the next spiritual experience, the next release—anything to make things okay, anything to take away the not okay.

Even children who have the most idyllic, loving upbringings do not escape this basic feeling of separation, of lack. It seems to be built into the experience of being an individual. No parents are guilty of creating this sense of separation, this sense of lack; nobody is intentionally turning their children into seekers. Newborn organisms capable of abstract thought naturally come to seek a conceptual completeness in the future. They naturally begin to build up all sorts of ideas about what is okay and what is not okay in their experience, and try to escape everything they come to perceive as not okay, in order to reach a place of okay. Seen from this angle, developing a sense of separation, and then seeking to correct it by finding wholeness, is part of the natural evolution of life. Seeking is not a mistake, and it is not the enemy. It is simply a case of mistaken identity.

PRESENT-MOMENT RESISTANCE

I will be complete …

when I finally fit in with my peer group, with my work colleagues, with society.

when people finally understand me and approve of what I do.

when everybody around me changes.

when I’ve created a masterpiece that everybody adores.

when my body is perfect.

when I’ve finally manifested my destiny.

when I’ve found my soul mate.

when I’m fully awakened.

when I win the gold medal.

when I have a child.

when I’ve finally found what I’m looking for.

We look to the future for completeness, because on some level we feel incomplete in the present moment.

You want to be understood in the future? It means that on some level you feel misunderstood now. You want enlightenment in the future? It means that on some level you feel unenlightened now. You want love in the future? It means that on some level you feel unloved right now. The question “What are you seeking in the future?” is identical with the question “What are you running away from right now?”

It is crucial to understand this: our search for something abstract in the future—enlightenment, wealth, power, success, love—is always deeply rooted in present-moment resistance. Our search for future completeness is always rooted in an experience of present incompleteness. Present-moment incompleteness is where all our suffering and seeking begin. And a deep acceptance of the present moment is where it can end.

Sometimes people come to me and ask how they can become enlightened. They believe that I am enlightened (though I would never say I am) and that I can teach them how to become like me. Often I will simply answer, “Well, what do you mean by the word enlightenment? When you become enlightened, how will your experience be different from the way it is right now?” And often in response they will say something like, “I think that when I become enlightened, my fear will go away. I think my sadness and my pain will disappear. I think enlightenment will take away all the bad things about myself.”

You see, nobody really wants to become “enlightened.” They want to escape present feelings of dissatisfaction, sadness, pain, anger, frustration, boredom, or feelings of being unloved, unwanted, and unfulfilled. They simply want to end their suffering. But instead of facing that suffering head on, right now, and seeing the wholeness within it, they are waiting for a future event or state or experience to come and end it for them. They simply want to come home, as we all do. But in their story, they have fixated on the idea of enlightenment as their future home.

We don’t want pain to appear, and yet it appears. We don’t want fear to appear, and yet it appears. Because of our conditioning, we don’t see pain, fear, sadness, anger, and all kinds of other feelings as part of the completeness, as part of the wholeness of life. We have been conditioned to see parts of our experience as imperfections, contaminations, aberrations, impurities, expressions of incompleteness. In other words, we have been taught, trained, even brainwashed, to see some parts of our experience as threats to life itself. We believe that parts of our experience are somehow against life—like they don’t deserve a place in us. Anger, fear, sadness, discomfort, pain—they should not be allowed in. I reject them because I believe that they don’t belong in me. I don’t see them as being part of the wholeness of life. I believe that they are dangerous to my well-being. And so I spend my life running away from them.

Which parts of your experience feel like they don’t belong? Which thoughts, sensations, feelings feel alien to you? Which ones feel out of place, like they shouldn’t be there, like they aren’t really you?

Put very simply, we seek purity, perfection, and completeness outside of this present experience because we see our present experience as broken, as incomplete, as imperfect, as not whole in some way. We seek wholeness because we do not see wholeness in this present moment. We do not see the wholeness in these present thoughts, sensations, and feelings, so we look for it in the future. We become seekers of wholeness, and now we require a future to complete ourselves. The seeker always needs time to find what he or she is looking for. The present moment becomes a means to an end.

This is where all suffering begins—the loss of the present moment, the loss of our true home.

TRYING TO CONTROL THIS MOMENT

A man was once speaking to me about his problem with controlling his anger around his children. He said his anger was like a volcano—it would erupt out of nowhere, when he least expected it. He would return home from work, exhausted after a long day at the office, and his kids would be screaming, running around all over the place, making a mess. He would do everything he could to try to calm them down, to make them behave. He’d try every tactic he’d learned over the years—talking nicely to them, reasoning with them, ignoring them, being “present” with them, being firm with them, being “spiritual” with them, rewarding them, punishing them. But nothing worked. They simply wouldn’t listen to him, and he would start to feel the anger bubbling up inside of him. He would desperately try to keep his anger at bay; he would try to hold it in, accept it, love it, allow it, transcend it, be “choicelessly aware” of it, repress it, “become” it, but it would always just explode, no matter what he did or didn’t do. And then he would find himself lashing out at his children, roaring at the top of his lungs, insulting them, saying things he didn’t really mean, behaving in a way that he would later regret. His anger seemed to be out of his control.

Sound familiar? Do you sometimes find yourself reacting in ways you don’t understand, with your children, your partner, your parents, your friends?

Remember, all examples in this book apply to you. With every example I give, go straight to your own experience and find where it is relevant to your life.

This man had been to some spiritual teachers and shared his problem with them, and they told him things like, “Choose not to be angry” or “There is no choice whether anger appears or not” or “There is only Oneness. Everything is equal, so it doesn’t matter whether you get angry with your children or not. Nobody is getting angry.” These ideas provided some temporary relief, but they did not ultimately end his suffering. He could see that, ultimately, exploding with rage was simply a part of life and had its place, but that understanding didn’t stop it from happening or end his suffering over it. The anger was there, whatever the spiritual teachings said, and it was destroying his relationship with those he loved the most. All the spiritual concepts in the world didn’t seem to get to the heart of his problem. It felt like there was nothing he could do, and he just had to learn to tolerate his anger.

I asked the man what he was seeking in the situation, and he couldn’t answer. It seemed like the angry outbursts just happened to him. He just couldn’t see how his angry outbursts were related to his search for wholeness, to his being at war with present experience. He didn’t see himself as someone who was seeking anything. He wasn’t looking for enlightenment. He wasn’t looking for fame or wealth. It seemed as though he was just responding to a very difficult situation in the best way he could.

Sometimes to find the seeking in a situation you need to stop, take a deep breath, and hold up a magnifying glass to present experience. The man and I started to explore his experience, and with some very simple and honest investigation, it soon became clear that a lot was happening during the few short moments it took him to go from politely asking his kids to settle down to exploding in anger.

As he saw his children screaming and shouting, all sorts of very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings arose—feelings about his own incompetence as a father and his powerlessness in the face of the situation. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I control them? I’m a grown man—I should be able to control the situation. But I can’t. I’m failing as a father, failing as a man.” Feelings of intense frustration and then despair and total helplessness were appearing, and these feelings began to feel totally overwhelming. The grown man began feeling like a helpless child—not the mature, strong father that he wanted to see himself as. It would begin to feel like his whole identity was crumbling, and a kind of existential panic set in. It was almost as if he were facing his own physical death; in fact, he was facing the death of his self-image as a mature, strong father figure, the death of who he thought he was, who he thought he should be in the moment, who other people thought he was. He was facing the death of the image of himself that he had been living with, the image that he had been projecting onto the world. And this confrontation was provoked simply by his children being a little too loud.

In his helplessness, in his powerlessness, in his panic, he felt the urge to lash out. In his weakness, he wanted to feel strong again. There was something in him that did not want to feel helpless and out of control—especially in the presence of his children!

When you feel totally powerless and unable to control the moment, lashing out and demonstrating power can provide some relief, if only temporarily. Attacking another human being is the perfect way to distract yourself from your own deeply uncomfortable feelings—feelings you simply don’t want to allow in yourself. It is often when we feel most helpless (and cannot see our helplessness or admit to ourselves and others that we feel this way) that we become the most irrational, the most violent, and sometimes end up hurting those we love. Instead of allowing ourselves to feel hurt, we hurt others. And then we blame them; we tell them they deserved what they got, that they caused the explosion, that they made us angry. (And then, if we have picked up nonduality concepts, we tell them that we had no choice!)

At some point in his life, this man learned—as most of us do—that feelings like helplessness and powerlessness are not okay. Feeling unable to control the moment is not okay. Feeling weak is not okay. Feelings like helplessness are associated with lack of safety, with danger, with not being loved or accepted, and ultimately they are associated with death. For many people, the feeling of helplessness is to be avoided at all costs. Much of our suffering comes from deeply unaccepted feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, weakness, insecurity, and uncertainty in the face of this moment.

We could probably boil all our suffering down to this:

I want to control this moment, but I cannot!

This man may not have been seeking enlightenment or fame or glory, but in the moment, he was a desperate seeker. He was urgently seeking to control and escape feelings of weakness and powerlessness in the face of life. In the moment, he became a seeker of power, of control, and ultimately of love. He was seeking an escape from what he was experiencing. And lashing out at his kids provided, for a moment, the escape, the release he craved.

On the surface, he looked like a father unable to control his anger at his naughty children. But when you look at what the man was actually experiencing, you see someone feeling utterly frustrated, feeling like a total fool and a failure as a father and as a man, feeling powerless and helpless and weak, and desperately seeking a way out of his predicament. And you see someone not able to admit any of this, to himself or to his children. Underneath our rage, we will always find unaccepted pain and powerlessness.

Until he saw the seeking that was going on within his experience, the man felt that this suffering was just happening to him—that he was a helpless victim of life, that perhaps he was genetically programmed to get angry, or that his response to his children was cosmically predestined in some way and, thus, there was no hope of change. But by exposing the seeking the way we did, it became clear exactly why he was suffering and how that suffering was being created. He was simply not allowing himself to feel what he felt, in the moment. He was not allowing himself to feel helpless, even for a moment. He could not see the deep acceptance in his present experience of helplessness.

In coming to see what he was running away from (helplessness), he automatically saw that he no longer needed to run away from it—that it was okay to feel helpless, that the feeling of helplessness, in that moment, could be totally accepted. (I will talk later about how and why even the most seemingly negative feelings can be accepted. ) He had simply never allowed himself to feel truly helpless before, even for a moment (and a moment of helplessness is all you ever have to face);he had always assumed that it was not okay to feel that way. In seeing that it was, in fact, deeply okay to feel helpless, in this moment, and that there was even a strange joy and peace in the midst of the helplessness, he no longer felt the urge to escape.

Accepting his feeling of helplessness meant he was no longer a victim of life. Helplessness was no longer controlling him, because it was now allowed to appear and disappear in him. And what he discovered was that, in finally allowing himself to feel weak and helpless—totally helpless—he felt less helpless and more in control than ever. Strength is not the opposite of weakness. Real strength lies in the total embrace of weakness. (We will see later how, in truth, there are no opposites in present experience. )

When you see what you are seeking, and when you see that what you are trying to escape is deeply okay—that recognition, in itself, is the end of seeking. Seeing is the end of seeking. And there is no next step. No “how to” is then required.

Later, I will discuss in more detail how, in every moment, every single part of your present experience is already deeply accepted. But for now, let’s simply note that in every experience of suffering, when you take the focus off the details of the situation, off the story of what’s happening, off the external circumstances, and really come back to your present experience—to present thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the body—you will always find seeking, even if that seeking is playing out in very subtle ways. You will always find there’s something you’re not allowing yourself to fully experience, something that is innocently trying to express itself within you, but is being met with fear and resistance. You will always find an invitation to deeply accept this moment, however unacceptable this moment seems.