What is your deepest longing? Where are you looking to fulfill that longing? Many people are drawn to a spiritual search because what they truly long for seems to elude them. What they are really looking for is themselves, and it has been here all along. All that is required is to stop, open, and let yourself be found.
Is the Longing the Problem?
Maybe you have a deep longing for connection, for truth, for love, for yourself. When investigated, is this longing really the problem? When you inquire into this longing, what is here?
What Do You Truly Want?
How has the longing for freedom shown up in your life? Gangaji's message is to stop searching, right where you are, and turn your attention to what is alive in your own heart.
Papaji used to say, you cannot make realization happen, but you can make yourself a big target so that realization finds you. The best way to make yourself a target is to be still. What you have been hiding from your whole life has been here all along.
If you are willing to stop throwing things at your heart’s longing, to stop searching for an escape from the longing, it will reveal its own consummation.
At some point in a blessed life there arises the desire for truth. Not just “my” truth, but real truth, final truth, eternal truth. This doesn’t happen for everyone. It is a mystery why this desire appears in some people and not in others. The trouble comes, however, when we take our extensive learning techniques and try to apply those strategies toward finding truth. Inevitably we fail.
When we see that all our sophisticated techniques are useless in fulfilling true spiritual desire, we tend to regress to simple yelling. We may even yell a prayer: “Help me, take me, show me.” This prayer is close, but even it doesn’t usually work, because we are so absorbed in our yelling that we neglect to see that what we are yelling for is already here. The yelling doesn’t work, so we try something else. This is called the cycle of reincarnation. It is a daily cycle, a monthly cycle, a yearly cycle, a whole lifetime of cycling in and out, in and out, and failing, failing, failing. Yes, there are beautiful glimpses of truth along the way, moments of exquisite joy, union, understanding, and wisdom. But the moment these experiences end, we begin yelling again, or searching again, or trying again.
Many people misunderstand what it means to call off the search. It does not mean to give up the desire for truth. It means to stop searching for truth outside yourself, and to stop relying on the mind to orchestrate how truth will be revealed. It means to give up the arrogant belief that you will somehow locate truth and bring it to yourself. This belief is based on the lie that you are separate from truth. When this lie is believed very strongly, it creates further experiences of the lie, until finally you recognize that all the yelling, all the searching, all the figuring out, the gathering of more and more experiences, just leave you with attention on the search rather than attention on what is and has always been here.
It is truly a blessed and divine moment in a lifetime when the desire for truth appears. The tragedy is that this desire is often translated into some mental concept of how to get truth, or how to get rid of obstructions to truth. This object of the mind is then worshipped, prayed to, and relied on more than truth itself.
The desire for truth is the longing you feel in your heart. The mental relationship with that longing is all of the things you throw at it to try to make it go away because it’s bothering you and it won’t be satisfied with anything less than pure authenticity, pure being. If you are willing to stop throwing things at your heart’s longing, to stop searching for an escape from the longing, it will reveal its own consummation.
