What you seek is seeking you
– attributed to Rumi
I imagine this has been expressed by many through time and across cultures and traditions. It’s an expression of perennial insight or wisdom.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
It’s often used to mean that if we seek something essential – love, or truth, or home, or the divine / God, or our nature – then that seeks us. Or even that it’s seeking us whether we are seeking it or not.
IS IT ACCURATE?
In a practical sense, it seems accurate.
When we seek love, truth, the divine, our nature, and so on, and do so with sincerity, receptivity, honesty, and diligence, and with some good guidance, then things often move and fall into place in ways we didn’t arrange or made happen on our own, or couldn’t have. We invite grace. It’s as if what we seek is seeking us.
In some cases, that grace happens without us consciously seeking it. Something happens that puts us on the path. We receive guidance and pointers without asking. Our nature reveals itself to itself without any conscious interest or intention on our part. Here, it definitely looks as if what we seek is seeking us.
NOT ALWAYS THE WAY WE WANT
When what we seek is seeking us, and when grace happens, it can happen in many different ways.
It can be in the form of a glimpse or shift, meeting someone that puts our life in a different direction, finding a book, finding a guide or community that’s a good match, and so on.
And it doesn’t always happen in a way that our personality likes. It’s not always pretty. What puts us on a different course can come in the form of an illness, accident, loss, conflict, and so on.
It can come in the form of gentle or fierce grace.
IT’S ALWAYS HAPPENING
We can also say that the quote is always accurate. Our seeking is always, in its essence, for the essential. And the essential is, in some ways, always seeking us.
Whatever it looks like we are seeking, we are really seeking something essential. We may think we are seeking comfort, love from another, approval, success, money, admiration, being understood, ice cream, and so on. And even here, the essence of the seeking is a seeking for love, truth, the divine, and our nature. (We can find this for ourselves by taking a surface desire, asking “what do I hope to get out of this”, repeat that question, and see what we are most essentially seeking.)
And even if we are caught up in surface seeking – which we all are at different times and in different ways – what we are essentially seeking is seeking us. Love, truth, the divine, and our nature is seeking us. It’s inviting us to notice the essence of our seeking. And it’s inviting us to notice the love, truth, the divine, and our nature making up our whole experience and reality.
Reality is set up so the invitation is always here. We are swimming in it whether we notice it or not. We are swimming in our seeking of the essential, even if it takes the surface form of seeking all kinds of things. We are swimming in the invitation to notice the love, truth, the divine, and our nature that’s all we know, whether we notice it or not.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
We also have the usual bigger picture.
This is all happening within and as the consciousness we are. The seeking, the sought, the process, the apparent failures and successes, and so on are all happening within the consciousness we are. What seeks and what is sought happens within and as what we are. It’s the consciousness we are taking all of these forms.
It’s the oneness we are going into a trance forgetting itself as oneness. It’s the oneness we are seeking to notice itself as oneness. It’s the oneness we are seeking to wake itself up from the trance.
FINDING IT FOR OURSELVES
I am very aware that this can sound abstract, distant, and convoluted.
That’s OK since this is not about the words. This is something we can find for ourselves.
In a conventional sense, we may appear to be this human self in the world. That’s an assumption that works relatively well, although it comes with some inherent discomfort.
And when we look in our own first person experience, we may find something else. I find I am more fundamentally capacity for the world as it appears to me, for any experience that’s here. I find I am what the world, to me, happens within and as. I am the oneness the world, to me, happens within and as.
This oneness is what goes into a trance of taking itself as someting within the field of experience and the rest as “other”. This oneness is what seeks to find itself. This oneness is what seeks to release itself out of the trance.
The essence of this process is to differentiate our mental representations about ourselves, the world, and anything from what’s here in our immediate noticing. The first may tell us we are something in particular within the content of experience. The second shows us we are what our experience happens within and as.
DRAFT FRAGMENTS
It’s all happening within and as the consciousness we are. The seeking, the sought, the process, the apparent failures and successes, and so on are all happening within the consciousness we are. In that sense, we can say that what we are is seeking itself. Or that what we seek is seeking whatever we take ourselves to be.
There is also a natural impulse in us to seek to be conscious of our nature. In a sense, that natural impulse is seeking us. It moves to make us aware of our nature.
It’s all happening within and as the divine. It’s the divine seeking itself. And it’s the divine seeking
We also have the usual bigger picture.
This is all happening within and as the consciousness we are. The seeking, the sought, the process, the apparent failures and successes, and so on are all happening within the consciousness we are. What seeks and what is sought happens within and as what we are. It’s the conscious we are taking all of these forms.
It tells itself it’s fundamentally this human self seeking the divine, its true nature, and so on. It creates dynamics within itself of seeking and sought. Here, it appears as if what you are seeking is seeking you.
And, in reality, it’s the oneness we are seeking to notice itself as oneness. It’s the oneness we are seeking to wake itself up from the trance of taking itself as most fundamentally this human self.
Here too, we can say that what you seek is seeking you. The oneness we are takes itself as a me, as a human self, seeking oneness. So this oneness is seeking itself.
At one level, its seeking for the me to realize its nature. And more accurately, its seeking for itself to wake up out of the trance of taking itself as fundamentally a me and instead notice itself as oneness.
DRAFT
What you seek is seeking you.
I have often heard this and don’t know if it has one particular source. I imagine it’s something that’s been expressed by many through time and across cultures and traditions. It’s a form of perennial insight or wisdom.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
It’s often used to mean that if we seek something essential – love, or truth, or home, or the divine / God, or our nature – then that seeks us. Or even that it’s seeking us whether we are seeking it or not.
IS IT ACCURATE?
Yes, I can find a few ways it seems accurate.
In a pragmatic sense, it seems accurate.
When we seek love, truth, the divine, our nature, and so on, and do so with sincerity, receptivity, honesty, and diligence, and with some good guidance, then things often move and fall into place in ways we didn’t arrange or made happen on our own, or couldn’t have. We invite grace. It’s as if what we seek is seeking us.
In some cases, that grace happens without us consciously seeking it. Something happens that puts us on the path. We receive guidance and pointers without asking. Our nature reveals itself to itself without any conscious interest or intention on our part. Here, it definitely looks as if what we seek is seeking us.
THE WAY IT’S ALWAYS HAPPENING
We can also say that it’s always accurate. Our seeking is always, in its essence, for the essential. And the essential is, in some ways, always seeking us.
Even if are not seeking anything essential, what we are really seeking is something essential. We are seeking the essential without knowing it. We may think we are seeking comfort, love from another, approval, success, money, admiration, ice cream, and so on. And the essence of it is a seeking of something more essential. The essence of the seeking is of love, truth, the divine, and our nature.
And even if we are caught up in surface seeking – which we all are at different times and in different ways – what we are essentially seeking is seeking us. Love, truth, the divine, and our nature is seeking us. It’s inviting us to notice the essence of our seeking, and that the invitation is always there to notice the love, truth, the divine, and our nature making up our whole experience and reality.
Reality is set up so the invitation is always here. We are swimming in it whether we notice or not. We are swimming in our seeking of the essential, even if it takes the form of seeking all kinds of things. We are swimming in the invitation to notice the love, truth, the divine, and our nature that’s all we know, whether we notice or not.
THE WAY IT’S NOT ACCURATE, AND STILL IS
There are also some ways it may not be accurate. Mainly, if we are seeking something not essential, then what we are seeking is perhaps not seeking us. And what we are really seeking, whether we know it or not, may still be seeking us.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
We also have the usual bigger picture.
This is all happening within and as the consciousness we are. The seeking, the sought, the process, the apparent failures and successes, and so on are all happening within the consciousness we are. What seeks and what is sought happens within and as what we are. It’s the conscious we are taking all of these forms.
It tells itself it’s fundamentally this human self seeking the divine, its true nature, and so on. It creates dynamics within itself of seeking and sought. Here, it appears as if what you are seeking is seeking you.
And, in reality, it’s the oneness we are seeking to notice itself as oneness. It’s the oneness we are seeking to wake itself up from the trance of taking itself as most fundamentally this human self.