Dissatisfaction: Longing For Something We Can't Quite Define

If you have a sense of vague dissatisfaction or longing for something you can't quite define, of trying to get back home, this talk may be useful.
I share my story of searching home in material possessions and self-improvement and why looking out was never the answer. We need to look in, and the home we are searching for, that space in which all of our searching occurs, has never been lost, just overlooked.
It is closer than our own breath. It's what has been doing the searching.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this talk. So today I want to talk about about restlessness and about that longing that we have for something that we often can't quite define. So I was rereading my diaries from 13 years ago and beyond the level of events that I described and the activities that I did I could clearly see this longing this sense of having lost something that I didn't even I couldn't even articulate and I think this is a quite a common experience that we we feel like something is missing in our life and then we we embark on a search to find it. I think often this search first takes the form of trying to get more material possessions. We think that things will make us happy but sooner or later we realize that every new thing that we buy gives us a kind of a jolt of pleasure but that that feeling of searching that feeling of longing soon returns so we realize that no things cannot make us happy so then we turn to to the spiritual search and that was my experience as well. But what's interesting is that we often can't even define what we're looking for while the experience of of longing for something I think it's quite common it's more of a feeling that we we strayed away from something that we had something precious when we're children and then we either forgot or we lost it and now we're trying to get back. I think often it takes we kind of think that maybe it was maybe it's natural maybe we were just innocent when we're children and it's a natural part of growing up having lost that freshness of living and that sense of belonging but I would argue that that's not that's not the case that's not true. We have never lost it and we can never lose it we just we have just overlooked it. So to get back the spiritual search or we can also call it a self-improvement search that was my next stage after I became disillusioned with material possessions so I thought that the goal of life and the thing that would stop my searching would be to to get better. So I started improving myself reading self-help books and working on myself and trying to trying to grow. The problem with that though was that it also never gave me that sense of completion. The more books I read the more books they were. The more I worked on myself the more there was this sense of dissatisfaction. I never felt that I have arrived and that sense of longing that sense of seeking for something never quite abated. So I want to contrast two ways of searching. So we can search outside which is trying to get things trying to improve ourselves reading books following other people's advice joining a religion and the other way is that we can look inside and I think that's what many people are doing here on this platform and that for me took a form of meditation. So looking inside when I started meditating that was very messy in the beginning. I could really couldn't concentrate. My mind was racing but the more I looked inside the more I meditated the more I realized that beyond thought there is this space in which thoughts occur and where they disappear. So in the beginning I didn't really connect it with with my search. I was just doing meditation to calm my mind. I could feel that I felt better after doing that so that was my reason for doing that. But the deeper I went into meditation and for me the the turning point was really discovering a waking up app by Sam Harrison and doing his introductory course. So meditation and particularly non-dual meditation or non-dual exploration helped me realize that what I was searching for all this time was so close. It was closer than my breath. It's like trying to get closer to your own body by moving, Getting up and moving in the room. We can never do that because we carry our body with us. No direction we go will get us closer. We are already there. We have already arrived. So I realized that what I was longing for and what I was searching for and that sense of having lost something, Trying to clench that thirst with material possessions and with substances and with relationships and with self-improvement. All that was fine but it was not going to get me closer to what I was longing for and searching for because that consciousness, That home that I was longing and searching for, I was always there. It was that consciousness, That space, That context as a spiritual teacher Ajai Shanti calls it. That context in which all of my searching was taking place. So to give you a simple example, When we meditate, I think this is a very common experience, When we meditate at some point we start to notice that thoughts as what we previously identified ourselves with, Those thoughts they appear and then they disappear. So we start to notice that we're not really identical with those thoughts because if we can notice them, If we notice that one thought appears and then another thought appears and then we start to notice this gap between thoughts, That's this space in which they occur. And the same way with sensations in the body, The same way with sounds. So we notice that we are not those objects, We are the space in which they occur. So that gives us suddenly a new plane of being, I would say. So we suddenly realize that, Oh I'm not my thoughts, Or I'm not my bodily sensations, Or I'm not the sounds, Well that is then quite obvious, Or I'm not this, I'm not that, I'm the space in which they occur. And the longer we stay with this, The longer we meditate and the deeper we go into this feeling. Though deeper is a very maybe misleading word here because it's not very deep, It's on the surface, We just have overlooked it because we have been searching for some grand object, We have been searching for some outside experience, We've been searching for some object or relationship or state of mind that we thought we needed to find when all that time that the consciousness, That space that we really are, Was always the space in which our search was taking place. So it's like we're trying to find some transcendental state when actually anything that we, You know, Anything that, Any state that we have, Any object that we have, Any thought that we have, It already appears in that space in consciousness, That is our home, That is the place we've been looking for, That is the what gave us this longing to return to it. We never actually left, But we forgot about it, We overlooked it, And that's what gave us this longing, This sense of having lost something. So to conclude, I want to encourage you to continue looking in because it is the same place ultimately that we will return to. The roads to it differ, The school of meditation or the type of practice, Each has their own, But just trust your intuition and trust your inner guidance and do whatever practice that feels right to you and keep looking, Keep looking for that home because because it's already here. Thank you for, Thank you for listening. Till next time, Bye-bye.