The spiritual path looks quite different depending on where we are coming from.

When there is a glimpse of what we are, the spiritual path becomes a process of clarifying and living from it. It is a process of examining the veils that may cover it up again, make ourselves familiar with the dynamics, and also recognize more clearly that what we are is already independent of veils or clarity, confusion or awakening.

This glimpse can come at any point on the path, including before the path has started, and it can come repeatedly before it stabilizes, or be quite stable right away. No rules here, it seems.

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Again, maybe 101 stuff, but may still be useful as a pointer and inquiry….

All seeking, is a seeking of God.

As a statement, it is not very helpful. But as a question and starting point for own inquiry, it may be.

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Saying that God is longing to know itself is, as anything else, only a pointer, an invitation to exploration. It is not true or not true, apart from in the most limited sense, and the reversals are equally true. 

So how is this a pointer? In what way is it a helpful teaching? What is it a remedy for? 

The most obvious may be as an invitation to explore our own longings. I can take any longing in my own life, however mundane and unspiritual it may seem, and trace it back. What is it really a longing for? What is more genuinely true for me about it than its surface appearance? 

I have a desire for food. What is it about? I find that it is about survival, avoiding suffering, and finding some happiness. It is innocent, and a way to take care of this human self. 

I have a desire for success. Here too, I find that it is about survival, avoiding suffering, and finding some happiness. Again, it is innocent, and it is love filtered through stories. 

I have a longing for connection. Again, I find the same things. 

By exploring this, I find that my longings - the ones I have looked into so far - are all innocent, and they are love filtered through certain stories. The longing is always genuine and innocent. And the strategies to fulfill those longings may or may not make sense after I investigate them. If they don’t, there is always room to try something else. 

There is a relaxation here, a relase of struggle with myself. 

I also find that each longing is a longing for allowing what is, as it is, and for a full and rich human life. In other words, it is a longing for waking up - for appreciating what is, as it is, including the confusion, drama and mistaken identities, and also for releasing identification out of stories and identities, and the drama and resistance that comes from getting caught up in them. And it is a longing for growing up, for healing and maturing as a human being in the world. 

So the pointer God is longing to know itself is a way for me to clarify my own longings, my own intentions and desires. Not to change them, but to see what they really and genuinely are about for me. And I may find that they are innocent, and genuine desires to grow and wake up. There is a new sense of alignment when this is recognized, and it may happen over and over as I explore new longings and desires, or explore again the ones I have looked at before. It is always new. Fresh. Different. 

There are also other ways the hadith God is longing to know itself is a pointer. 

It is an invitation to see what is happening here now. To notice that form happens within and as awakeness, and not even that, just as the mystery no pointers can touch. This world of form, as it is, is God longing to know itself. It is no thing longing to know itself as (the appearance of) something, in always new, fresh and different ways. 

It is of course an anthropomorphism. There is no longing there. And yet, maybe we can say there is. The movement into form in itself can be seen as a longing for God to know itself as and through form.

Including as this universe, planet, plants, animals, humans, mistaken identities, awakenings, and whatever else is happening. 

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The Zen cook takes whatever ingredients are available and works with it. 

So how does that look in terms of desires? For instance, a desire to know, do and die? 

A desire to know can be cooked with in a less helpful way, as a way to accumulate stories for their own sake and taking them as true. And it can be cooked with in a more helpful way, as a desire to know what I am and a more playful exploration of stories as temporary tools. When does any particular story seem useful? When not? 

A desire to do can be cooked into an escape, and be less helpful in the long run. And it can be cooked in a more helpful way, at our human level and also to invite what we are to notice itself. It can be a doing of inquiry and allowing shifts making it easier for what I am to notice itself. 

A desire for something to die is similar. When cooked in confusion, it can be less helpful. When cooked with more clarity, it can be a motivation for change in our human life, and also for allowing identification with stories and a sense of a separate I to fall away. What do I more honestly want to die? When I explore it for myself, I find that it is that identification with a story.  

There are two ways to approach this. 

I can take whatever ingredients are here and cook with them differently, maybe with a little more skill. 

And I can trace desires back, find what they more honestly are about for me. 

And those two are not that different. 

A good cook will naturally be curious about the ingredients. What are they really? 

And when desires are traced back, they naturally are cooked with differently. Initially, it may appear as a desire to know about the history of China, and then it is clarified as a desire to know what I am and explore the infinite ways it plays itself out as form. (Including as the history of China!)

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Again, it is quite simple and maybe obvious. And when I explore it in my own life, it can be very juicy.

My actions show what I act on. What I value. What I take as important. What is a priority to me.

Sometimes, it comes from a belief. Fear. Shoulds. Identifications.

And sometimes, it comes from my heart. Intuition. What is fulfilling to me.

When there is a release from the belief, there is freedom to act from my heart.

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Draft…

When I look at desires and motivations, I find two main types.

One type of desire comes from our human self. We want to get something. And mainly, we want to avoid suffering and find happiness. 

This makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. It is how the human individual and species takes care of itself. 

And it is also what happens when we identify with any story. There is a sense of an I with an Other. And we want to take care of that I. 

Another type of motivation is a quiet love for God or truth. This seems to be more of a remembrance of what we are, and a quiet longing back. 

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When I explore intention, I find that it helps in daily life and also in growing and waking up.

And although it may seem to help to change or form intentions, all I really need is to clarify the ones already here. I can work with what is here, instead of against it.

I notice an existing intention in whatever form it takes. Desire. Wish. Want. Attraction. Aversion. Seeking.

I trace it back. What do I hope to get out of it? And what do I hope to get out of that? What am I really looking for? What would be the most satisfying? (This is an inquiry Adyashanti suggests.)

By doing this, I find - for myself and for now - that any initial intention comes back to seeking to avoid suffering and to find happiness. No matter how mundane or crude the surface expression of the intention seems, when I trace it back I find that it is really innocent.

In daily life, clarifying intentions helps me prioritize, focus, stay receptive to opportunities and so on.

In terms of growing up, it helps me experience myself in a more unified way and as a whole. And it also helps me see that we are all in the same boat here. We all seek to avoid suffering and to find happiness, no matter how that is filtered and expressed. (Often through a bit of confusion.)

In in the context of waking up, it helps me recognize that all my intentions already are in the direction of waking up. I just need to notice.

And one way to notice is to trace my intentions back, over and over, so I get to see and feel its essence, the way it is expressed in my life right now (often filtered through confusion), and what happens when it is filtered in a confused way and when there is more clarity around it. And through that, there is a genuine appreciation and love for it all, as it is.

This is a topic that is endless. For instance, an aspect of many spiritual practices is to clarify intention. To helps us see that our one wish - appearing in all the different ways desire and intention appears in our life - is to wake up.

And it is also helpful to recognize the validity of intentions as they appear at different places in the chain back to their essence.

The surface desire may be for a hearty soup, which may be entirely appropriate to fulfill at the human level. Looking a little closer, I find a desire for something nurturing which I can also find through relationships, in nature, through Breema, and more. And when I trace it even further back, I find a desire for avoiding suffering and finding happiness, which is a desire for growing up and - if I take it that way - for waking up.

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A small biographical tidbit which illustrates a more universal dynamic.

As a child, I would often wake up in the morning with a deep longing. And I would get up and eat a strawberry jam sandwich (my favorite), be with my parents, read Donald Duck comics, and do other things to try to still or satisfy the longing, but nothing worked.

Then, as there was the initial (Ground+soul level) awakening in my mid-teens, I realized that this was what I had longed for. I knew - somewhere in the background - that this is what I am, and longed intensely for it. I was finally home, and finally, I knew what home was.

Some of the recent posts have been more than a little approximate…!

Big Mind does not desire, but is desire (when it arises)

For instance, in the posts on desire and insatiability, the distinction between Big Mind and desire is not quite clear. To put it simply, Big Mind does not desire (there is no Other to desire, and in its formless aspect it is free from form). Yet it also is desire, when desire arises in an individual. At that moment, Big Mind arises as desire.

So when desire arises in an individual for a full human life and awakening arises, which seems to be our deepest desire (at least for me), then Big Mind is free from it, yet also arises as the desire.

We can say that Big Mind is the desire for it to experience itself through and as a full human life, and also as Big Mind awake to itself.

In a very approximate (and anthropomorphizing) way, we can say that Big Mind (or God) desires to experience and explore itself as finite, through and as an individual human life. And not only that, but as finite in the form of this universe, as galaxies, solar systems, planets, planets becoming alive, ecosystems, social systems, cultures, industry, subcultures, neighborhoods, families, couples, and so on.

The formless desires to experience itself as form, and form desires the formless. The infinite desires to experience itself as finite, and the finite desires the infinite.

It is a catchy and poetic way of putting it. It sounds good at that level. But it is also very imprecise. It gives the impression that God (or Big Mind) desires, yet when there is only the I without the Other, there is no desire. Only rest. Peace (even in the midst of the worst storms and the strongest desires).

Fusion

In the same post on desire, the word fusion is used, and this fusion is just one of the relationships between Spirit, soul and human self. Ultimately, it is all Spirit, all God, the centerless and selfless field of seeing and seen.

But within this, there is a fusion of the three, an infusion of Spirit awake to itself into the individual, and an infusion of soul into the human self. The previous post is on this topic.

Collective shadows

And then the post on a journey into collective shadows. Collective shadows? No. Again that is just a poetic, a little more catchy, and very approximate way of talking about it.

My journey was very much through my own individual shadow, of the many and varied dark characters that puts a face on what is there.

But this individual shadow is formed within a culture where most people put many of the same things into their shadow. Even if there is individual variations, there are also many commonalities, and that is where the idea of a collective shadow comes from. Even for humanity as a whole, across cultures, many of the same things are put in our individual shadows.

And the faces put on what is in my individual shadow is of course influenced by everything I have experienced, including dark and shadowy characters from my own culture and many other cultures.

So the immediate experience of the journey is one of journeying through our collective shadow, the shadow of humanity. But, realistically, it is of course just this individual one reflecting what is out there, in our world culture.

It doesn’t really matter for the impact the experience has on me. What was important was the experiencing of each of these dark creatures from the inside, living and breathing their life, and at the same time seeing that it is the one transcendent I which is the I of all of these.

But it is still good to make the distinction.