It’s a long, long journey. And there’s nowhere to go. This is the great paradox of the spiritual life. We spend our days pursuing god, brahma, enlightenment, while everything we’re looking for, all that we seek is right here on the tip of our nose, hidden in plain sight. As long as we look outside this moment, this place, for fulfillment, peace, we look in exactly the wrong place.
This is the deeper meaning of Rebbe Nachman’s tale of the man who goes off to seek his treasure, traveling the world, returning home only to find it hidden in his own kitchen. This is not simply a tale of staying within one’s own religious tradition, as many have thought, it’s an expression of deep truth about the nature of life, consciousness, and our relationship to the divine, the animating force of all that is.
It’s also one of the messages of Eden, the reason why the story, the journey, begins at the end. Everything we’re looking for is here already.
This is a difficult lesson to internalize for someone such as me, who has spent his adult life trying to figure out how to change things. But if we look at things objectively, we have to admit that it’s true: We want a world of peace? Surely we’ve got everything we need to achieve that; there’s nothing more—no object, no technology—we require to simply stop hurting each other. If anything, we’ve got to get rid of stuff. Want everyone to have nutritious food? There’s plenty to go around. Once again, it’s our own blindness that gets in the way. A healthy planet with life supporting systems that sustain us in perpetuity? Got that too. For how much longer, who knows…but it’s clear that if we can get our act together as a species we can have that without lifting a finger.
What’s the point of this? Just a reflection of my own journey these days. Reminding and reminding and reminding myself that everything I yearn for is right here. It’s helpful to remember, and a blessing to let go of striving, of anxiety, of control, of the idea that somewhere somewhen somehow else things will be more complete. It’s all right here. And when I let go into that, the universe simply, elegantly, incredibly provides.
It’s a beautiful system, this organism on and in which we live. This tendency towards perpetual abundance is not limited to physical systems; it’s built into the fabric of the cosmos themselves. The secret is simply to stop, watch and allow.
Peaceful Sabbath,
Jonathan
Very very nicely written. By you writing this, it made me come back to a lot of things that I had read in the past that points towards the same conclusion. One that sticks out in my mind is from the present great Sufi writer Paulo Coelho in his book the Alchemist.
This story is exactly like that, Santiago has a dream to go in search of this treasure and so he follows his heart and his dreams experiencing alot of trials on the way… and well the story ends as you have said it but the boy cannot help but laugh that it was right in front of him this whole time.
Although we may face the trials we face on the journey i think alot of people get caught up in thinking, why couldn’t I just have known from the beginning so that I didn’t have to waste so much time (not saying you, but just in general) that they don’t see that its the journey that’s the Absolute, not the goal. We are the goal and always have been, thats whats so beautiful about it. Its just re-discovering who we really are. And that I wish i could answer but I do not even know myself, I am who I am but to describe it to another is impossible.
Thanks for the post.