The End of Seeking?

Amir Freimann: This is what I asked Anne Sweet, and now I’m asking you.
Based on everything you [Anne] said, I have not come to the end of seeking. I've been a seeker my entire adult life and I consider myself to still be a seeker. I identify with my individual, historical, separate existence more than with being the Self-Absolute. That's where I feel most at home, and I am happy in that home. And then, obviously, I'm attracted to and engage with the possibility of coming to the end of seeking. It makes my nerves tingle and my juices flow. What would you say to people like me – actually no, not to people like me – what would you say to me?

Robert Saltzman: Seeking is natural. Not just we human animals, but all animals must seek one thing or another. If thirsty, I will seek water. If not able to relax, I will seek circumstances or a point of view that might provide the peace of mind I desire. All that is normal. My cat will seek a quiet, safe place to sleep, and so will I.

But that is not the kind of seeking you mean, I think. You mean "spiritual seeking." Your seeking, as I understand what you have said, is a religious quest to find "God," which you are calling "the Self-Absolute," and to "realize" that "I Am That." Right?

But what if there is no such thing as "God?" What if this world, this experience, is just here without any "Absolute" behind it?

What if splitting experience into "my individual, historical, separate existence" on the one hand and a so-called "Absolute" on the other is simply an error, a mistaken view that falsely divides the indivisible, creating duality where none existed before that mistake?

What, after all, is the factual basis for splitting experience into the so-called "personal" on the one hand and the so-called "Absolute" on the other? What if a false duality, baked into religions of all kinds, is precisely what creates the problem of spiritual seeking in the first place, and perhaps if that dualistic view had not been imposed on you by the Vedas and the Bible and the rest of those heritages that shade the mind of humanity in a cloud of "knowing," you would not need to seek an end to it?

To see this from another angle, the grass always appears greener in the other meadow, but what if it's really the same meadow that was divided long ago by a barbed wire fence of religious superstition, leaving ordinary life on one side and "realized beings" on the other? What if the most "realized" of beings are those who do not recognize that divide and who have no interest in pursuing "realization" or so-called "nonduality." If you don't buy into the split in the first place, you won't need any teaching about how to repair it. Depending on no-thing, find your own mind.

As an analogy, consider Christianity which claims that you were born "sinful" and now must be absolved of sin by the sacred blood of Jesus. Millions of people spend their lives praying to a fantasy character to forgive their "sinful nature." Others, more fortunate perhaps, don't need Jesus because they don't think their primate animal nature is "sinful" in the first place--just naturally human, which may be what we "really" are.
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