Satsang Hopping and the End of the Search

By Adam J. Pearson

When I met my Guru, he told me: “You are not what you take yourself
to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am’, find your real
Self.” I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All
my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a
difference it made, and how soon!

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not
to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his
advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the
truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his
face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the
stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am — unbound.

I simply followed (my teacher’s) instruction which was to focus the
mind on pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it. I used to sit for hours
together, with nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind and soon peace and
joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all
disappeared — myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around
me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.

These are the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj, the great Advaita Vedanta sage and humble shopkeeper who followed a simple instruction from his teacher that took him Home to his true nature that he had never left. What is most striking about this account is Nisargadatta’s single-minded earnestness. He took his teacher seriously and committed to his instruction to attend to the pure and simple sense of being–“I Am”–with all of his energy, attention, and engagement.

Nisargadatta could have amused himself with a million other distractions, like Game of Thrones or Candy Crush–just kidding, his body left this mortal coil in 1981–but he didn’t. He focused on one teacher and one task and he saw where it took him. As it turned out, it took Nisargadatta beyond his notion of being a separate self altogether.

In his words:

The lifeforce and the mind are operating [of their own accord], but the mind will tempt you to believe that it is “you”. Therefore understand always that you are the timeless, spaceless witness. And even if the mind tells you that you are the one who is acting, don’t believe it. […] The apparatus [mind, body] which is functioning has come upon your original essence, but you are not that apparatus…

How often do we single-mindedly commit to one thing in the earnest style of Nisargadatta?

Many commentators have pointed out that modern humans increasingly display what could be called a ‘fast-food mentality,’ a compulsive drive to have and become more and more, faster and faster. A deep fear of missing out seems to push this drive to express itself in constant consumption: “what if I miss out on the next lover, the next iPhone, the next adventure, the next experience, the next deal, the next fix, the next drink?” The content varies, but the form is the same: the fear that “I will miss out on the next ____.” Insert anything we think we want in there and the statement holds, from a hot date to a hot donut.

Two words stand out as the fixing points of this compulsive mentality embodied in “I will miss out on the next_____”: “I” and “next.” The word “next” suggests a chronic preoccupation with the future that implies a dissatisfaction with the present. This dissatisfaction, a rejection of what is present in favour of some desired future ‘next thing,’ has deeper roots that stem from the very sense of being a separate ‘self’ in the first place. In every day speech, we tend to take the word “I” to refer to “me,” the sense of being a long-lasting, independent, separate entity that is assumed to be the thinker of thought, feeler of feelings, and doer of actions.

Seems harmless enough, right? Well, doctors once thought smoking was a valid treatment for asthma and as harmless as can be, but that didn’t turn out so well…

As  Paul Hedderman  expertly pointed out, the reality is that when we look for the ‘self’ that is the alleged reference of all of the talk of “I,” “me,” and “mine” that flows through the mind compulsively and anxiously on a daily basis, we never find it. We never have a present experience of a separate self, only an experience of a mental process, a flow of thoughts driven by the words “I,” “me,” and “mine.” The sense of ‘self’ that the storytelling mental process generates is not a present experience, so it has to be constantly remembered. When we really look for it in present experience, we find no thinker, only thoughts; no feeler, only feelings; no doer, only actions unfolding. When the mind identifies with the mental process that gives rise to the fabricated sense of self out of the wispy, fluctuating, and volatile materials of memory, thought, and emotion, we suffer. Our sandcastle sense of self gets washed away by the waves of time and change.

The body rejects the tyranny and agitation of a self that doesn’t exist, much like any responsible populace would to an imaginary dictator. Beneath the flow of thoughts and their dominant themes of trying to ‘have’ and ‘become’ more, no thinker is found driving the flow of thoughts; the thoughts come and go on their own. When the sense of self that is generated from remembering the mind’s stories about “me”into the present moment takes hold of the body-mind, it produces a sense of compulsiveness, agitation, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and even profound suffering. This unpleasant state tends to move the individual into a condition of seeking some kind of respite or solution to the problem.

In the spiritual community, this fast-food mentality applied to “the spiritual search” can take the form of individuals who dedicate years of their lives to the ‘satsang circuit’ just travelling around doing retreats with one guru after another, hopping between satsangs like a frog between lily pads. In some ways, it sounds like a wonderful time, but from the point of view of truth, there’s really no need to travel even a centimeter to get Home; we’re looking from it. Regardless of where we seem to go.

The story of being a “seeker of enlightenment” on a hero’s journey has a great appeal for the mind because it makes “me” special, woohoo! I’m a hero cutting through the demons of ignorance and suffering! Hi-ya! Hadouken!

Read More from Adam Pearson at http://philosophadam.wordpress.com/