Seeking Presumes Anything Past the Timeless, Restful Now is Real

It's not the end of pain we most deeply hunger for. It's to know what it is to feel alive. What if that's the whole thing? Maybe life doesn't need to have meaning or a purpose (and what if that isn't bleak)? Nor is life about whatever the obituary will report. Seeking makes a person gaze past the now. We look over the head of actual life, which is this moment. All our lives we do this. Then death comes. Seeking robs a person of this very moment.

Life isn't about finding a way to end pain. That's what drives most who want to wake up. Sorrow and grief are part of what it is to be human – which is distinct from mind-generated pain. What we long for is not to “awaken,” nor is it to feel good all the time. It's to know reality. It's fully to register the complicated truth of the moment, even when the heart is breaking. This is the precious thing we want not to have missed. Where is radical peace to be found? In the now. Learn to experience the difference between conscious awareness and thinking-about. A person is both divine and embodied. It is blessed to be human: we are self-aware. Self-awareness is also our curse. It doesn't have to be. What if life as a person turned out to be delightful rather than ceaseless torment? Go ahead: be somebody! (Use the forbidden “I,” while you're at it.)