The one who searches is the very thing one is searching for.
– Ramana Maharshi
I was reminded of this quote on social media this morning.
As usual with these kinds of pointers, they are obvious – and inescapable – when noticed, and baffling if not.
What’s searching is within content of experience, it’s the sense of a doer/searcher with identification attached to it. What I am, this awake space, forms itself into the whole field of content, including that. So what searches already is what it’s searching for. It already is this awake space.
Of course, it usually imagines it’s searching for something else – money, romantic love, safety, approval, and so on. Or maybe some big experience. Or God as “other”. That’s one reason it may not recognize it.
It’s fascinated by its own imagination of what it’s searching for. It misleads itself with those imaginations.
That’s why simple pointers are so valuable – for instance from the Big Mind process or the Headless Way.
When the oneness shift happened in my teens, this became obvious although it took many years before I found someone talking clearly and directly about. Although I was familiar with Buddhism and Taoism in my late teens and twenties, I didn’t find this clear speech until I was in my thirties and found Ramana Maharshi, Douglas Harding, Adveita Vedanta, Byron Katie, and so on.