Striving to gain happiness and contentment from something that is fleeting is ignorance. It can never be sustainable. Therefore, even striving for a mystical experience is delusion. What we’re looking for cannot be something that comes and goes.
If you notice, there’s no struggle when there is no seeking. It is the mind that creates dissonance. It creates self and other. The mind creates a thought and a thinker. But what’s looking is neither.
The mind creates an attachment of wanting to go somewhere and get something but the pure experience of being is that there’s nowhere to go, there is nothing to get.
If we look at our awareness, it’s always there waiting for us to check back in. Test it out. It’s always present. Yet, are we present?
Actually we tend to leave awareness nearly every moment. Every moment we jump out of ourselves and into a thought, belief, or concept.
However, the more we take steps back in, the more unified everything becomes.
The delusion starts with this idea of a self that needs to get something. This is the very root of our suffering. If we can look at this imagined fixed version of self, then we can unravel it.
Take a look at how your own self concept has been constructed over the years and what pieces did you grab onto? We’ve all been told, “I love you”, “I hate you”, “you’re awesome”, "you're not so awesome". What have you grabbed on to? What has stuck? Why has it stuck?
Has your gender stuck? Your profession? What you're good at? What you're not so good at?
All of these concepts of “I” are interdependent and impermanent.
However, what if our perception of self was fluid like reality is fluid? Take myself in this moment. I'm here sitting, breathing and writing. My back is in slight pain, and I'm not sure why.
This is all I know to be true. So I will abandon the need to know more than what this moment is giving me. I'm here, living in the simplicity of what it is, and nothing more needs to be done.