Seeking completion versus being complete

Here are some words that gave me pause:

"At the root of a lifetime of seeking was always the assumption that life wasn't complete...And out of this assumption, in a million different ways the individual tried to reach completion, and turned to drink or drugs or meditation..."
Jeff Foster, foreward to Everyday Enlightenment by Sally Bongers

The hamster wheel of futile seeking is highly addictive and I've often felt enslaved to this compulsion to strive toward one mirage of future fulfillment after the next. Secretly I know that the seeking itself is digging the hamster wheel deeper into the mud rut of suffering.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, says Will Rogers. Yet just stopping, just resting, is strangely terrifying. It means I'm lazy or missing the boat or wasting time or sinking into the jaws of stagnation. There is an imagined need to plunge into activity and seek completion through grabbing as much knowledge or satisfaction or recognition or enlightenment as I can before death overtakes me, as it could at any moment.

The mind puts forth many arguments against allowing the nondoing and silence into which it disappears. There is an enormous taboo against "nonproductive" use of time, and this taboo keeps us sprinting after endless wild goose chases. And the mind also thinks, "Even if activity isn't really getting me anywhere, at least it's staving off the dreadful feelings of boredom and uselessness." Meaningless activity is a universal anesthesia for the angst of being alive as a small, separate ego self. It makes the world go round.

There's no recipe or formula for getting off the hamster wheel or for recognizing the presence of wholeness, and that is good. It's not a mechanical process but something unique and spontaneous and creative and it happens by itself when we're not occupied with seeking it or avoiding it.

I had a rough weekend butting heads with my teenage daughter. Now we've worked things out and life goes on, and every day fresh-minted love for her arises in me out of nowhere. There is a strange comfort in not knowing. I can't pretend to know who my daughter is or what life is or what love is. When I thought I knew I was living in a small, cramped room. Not knowing feels so much more honest and unbounded.

Resting doesn't mean literally laying in bed all day. What rests is the anxious voice in the head that says "I have to get somewhere." Resting means moving through activities without attention being completely absorbed by the inner narration of a protagonist-me hacking its way through the neverending obstacle-course of daily life. It means gazing silently into present reality and sensing deeply the awareness in which everything appears.

There is plenty we can do to express the good will that is at our core, but that doing does not spring from a sense of incompletion. It is an outpouring from the completion we all experience on the level of being. There may still be times of feeling like a hamster on a wheel, an ego in samsara, but the dimension of silence is also here, and it is always possible to fall backwards into its arms.