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Our minds are real good at forming a picture of something we desire and determining practical steps to satisfy that desire. If you are hungry, you can picture what kind of food you want and the steps it takes to obtain it. That is what I call craving mind, it takes some kind of craving and sets up a picture of what you want, then figures out how to orient your behaviors toward satisfying that craving. And it works real well for a lot of practical things in life.
But for the highest aim, whether you call it realizing enlightenment or finding God or however you think of it, it is impossible to form a picture of what you are looking for, the steps to get there are very uncertain, and there is no way to be sure if they are taking you closer to the goal or not. So the craving mind does not seem well suited to this area of life. In fact, the more you try to use the craving mind to get there, the more dissatisfied you will be.
The attraction of the spiritual quest is that it promises to achieve the ultimate satisfaction—total fulfillment, above and beyond the satisfaction of all other desires. So why does it seem like the longer you seek it the further away it is? The craving mind is itself the obstacle to getting there, because the very process of setting spiritual realization as a future goal takes you away from openness to the present moment, where the Truth can only be found.
If you are not going to use that part of your mind that sets goals and determines the practical steps towards getting there, how do you going about finding spiritual fulfillment? Pay close attention now as I tell you how to get there.
The first step is to look at what you experienced when I raised the prospect of telling you how to get there, because it may have hooked you into your craving mind. Take stock of what that feels like. What you may feel is a movement of energy up into your head; that is the part of you that wants to know steps, that wants to have direction, that wants to have something to do. Being aware of what that feels like and recognizing it when it arises really is the prerequisite to moving away from it. If you do not know you are in that mental space it will remain a problem, but if it comes up and you notice what is taking place you have the opportunity to move away from it.
Once you notice it, what you do is relax. Instead of feeding that sense of craving and figuring out how to satisfy it, you relax and let go of it. You move the energy from the head down into a deeper place in your psyche, just come down from that place, step down from that ladder. Step down from the desire to figure it out, to determine the steps, to achieve a goal, to solve a problem.
There is a middle path in relaxing between two extremes that can trick you. The first extreme is to try too hard to relax. When you start over-monitoring yourself and working at being relaxed you are invoking the craving mind again, setting it up as a goal instead of letting go of goals. Relaxing is not a spiritual discipline to get you somewhere, it is an acceptance of what is, being okay with who you are whether it feels very spiritual or not.
The other extreme is to take relaxing as meaning not to do anything at all, as though doing something means you are not accepting things. You do not need to stop meditating or going to meetings or listening to spiritual teachers or reading sacred literature; this kind of relaxing does not mean stop doing things, it means do them with the right attitude, a relaxed attitude rather than a craving attitude.
A problem people often have with this idea is that if they are not doing such spiritual activities as steps toward a goal, how do you decide what to do? If the craving mind is not running the show, won’t I just come to a standstill? But when you step away from the craving mind, access to a different source of movement begins to open up inside of you. This source of guidance or direction is not premised on the means/ends goal-seeking kind of mentality. It is an inner sense of movement, like an intuition, it just feels right to move in this direction, to do this or that. You feel a draw toward a particular type of activity, a particular group, a particular teacher—almost like a magnetic pull.
Being locked into the craving mind obscures that sense. The more you can pull yourself out the craving mind and be in a state of openness, the more this other force has room to move, has room to come in and give you guidance, and will draw you towards the experiences that are best suited to taking you deeper into your natural state of spiritual awakening. Jesus said “seek and you will find” because you have to seek before you realize the futility of seeking. Reality is not hard to find once you stop looking for it in the future.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at 