Tuesday, April 13, 2021

search for?








Don’t you see that it is your very search for happiness
 that makes you feel miserable? 
 
Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, 
neither seeking, nor refusing, 
give all your attention to the level on which
 ‘I am’ is timelessly present. 

Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature 
and it is only seeking them through some particular channels that disturbs. 

Avoid the disturbance, that is all. 
 
To seek there is no need;
 you would not seek what you already have. 
You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. 
To begin with, trust me, trust the teacher. 
It enables you to make the first step - 
and then your trust is justified by your own experience.



~ Nisargadatta Maharaj



2 comments:

erin said...

i see and understand that the search for happiness is work that undoes. and i see and understand that peace comes when we allow life as it is. however, i think we put too much stock in happiness. it should never be an arrival gate but rather a temporary state of joy we pass through. it is but one desirable state.

i have made some very large life choices. my mother and i speak on the telephone. she prods, but - are you happy? i tell her, this is not the point. she can not understand. she thinks it a failure if i don't say yes.

standing at the kitchen sink, watching the first day's light, walking in the wilderness, my children touching me, my lover seeing into the sides of my void a thin wall of being - happiness touches me, yes, and peace, but so does sadness. how can i not be grateful to be alive? without a great wealth of sadness that acts as hands, how can i hold the passing happiness?

xo
erin

Dean Keller said...

thanks erin,

so nicely said.
the effort to hold on - or push away, so often occupies my attention, excluding the gifts of that moment.

letting go of that obsessive desire to control and protect, for me, has made way for an allowing sense of trust that has been a gateway though which beauty / love are found waiting to be embraced.

dean