Excerpts from Chapter 1: What Have You Been Seeking?
What have you been looking for all your life? Have you wanted peace, contentment, happiness, love, and joy? How much have you given of your money, your time, and your energy to find these things? How many books have you read, how many arguments, debates, meditation sittings, church services, meetings, vacations, retreats, relationships, sexual encounters, jobs, promotions, drugs, foods, diets, material items, thoughts, dreams, and goals were pursued or indulged in with the hope that, from these things, you would receive what you were seeking? Have you been looking for yourself—for the “better,” “happier,” or “more spiritual” you?
Have you realized that “better,” “happier,” and “more spiritual” are only presently arising ideas? They have no objective reality, except within your own mind-made, time-based dream of self. The ego is a set of thoughts. It is a dream of time, which means a dream of mind. I also call the ego “the dream self.” There is no such thing as an ego or dream self. Yet the words ego and dream self are used to describe this set of thoughts that is looking for a more complete version of itself. You, the ego, will never find completion on the level of time because time is merely mind. Thought. You are not real as a person separate from the rest of life. “You” are a thought that is chasing another thought called “better,” “happier,” or “more spiritual.”
By its very nature, the ego is unfulfilled and unfulfillable. You will never reach the ultimate version of yourself. Thought will not let you. That would mean the end of the ego—the end of you. Even if you reach some goal you have placed on yourself, the content of what you are seeking will simply change, creating another carrot out there beyond your reach. This is what the ego is, and what it does. It is a carrot making machine. It is a set of thoughts from which you derive a sense of self which always feels incomplete. These presently arising thoughts keep the search for a more complete self alive, which keeps the ego making more and different carrots. Today, the carrot may be a slimmer waist, tomorrow it may be a new husband, and next year it may be enlightenment. Carrots, that is all.
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The ego is like a rat on a wheel. The rat totally believes he is going somewhere, yet he is only spinning around and around. He does not realize that there is such a thing as “off the wheel.” He only sees the wheel. He only sees his own dream of becoming. Similarly, in its mind-made dream of future fulfillment, the ego’s search for fulfillment in time is only a mental dream. You are simply looking for fulfillment within your own thoughts. You never get there. You cannot. The wheel of self will not let you. The wheel is the time-based mind, and its only goal is to keep spinning, to keep becoming. This illusory, separate dream self is built from—and fueled by—a thought-made sense of lack, which feeds into mental projection towards future, which in turn feeds the sense of lack because you never quite “get there,” which in turn feeds the projection towards future. You are only ever chasing your own thoughts, which you mistake for reality.
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This truth, once it is realized deeply within, knocks you off your feet and out of your mind-made story of becoming. You then realize that there never was a spiritual path. I do not have a path. You do not have a path. This is not my life. That is not your life. There is only One Life. ‘This.’ Now. Here. One. God. You made the idea of a path up along the way to keep the focus on you. You have been like a dog chasing his own tail—like the rat on the wheel. Your mind was doing all this so that you would not realize that the peace that you were seeking is already who you are. When I say “who you are,” those too are just words. The simple truth is that there is no separate you outside of thought. So you arise as a separate person only when you think yourself into existence. When the mind is quiet, there is only ‘This.’