Suffering and Seeking...

Suffering and seeking are intrinsically tied together.

Suffering is the past. Suffering happens through identification with thought and emotion. Identification means that you believe that you are the thought-based story of your past and the emotions that arise in conjunction with that story. That story feels necessarily incomplete because it is not reality. It is a story that exists in time. Time is thought. This story is just a set of mental images. Images are, by their nature, incomplete. They have meaning only in relation to other images. The past story of you is looking for meaning—for completion in other images. Those other images are the future.

Seeking is the future. When the past story is believed to be who you are, the mind believes that it must do something to make the story complete in the future. Therefore, it engages in self-help therapy, career movements, relationships, buying material items, seeking enlightenment and a host of other things in order to find that completion.

This story is not really interested in completion. It is interested in continuing to keep the story alive. It does this through seeking. Suffering leads to seeking. Seeking leads to more suffering because future completion is never reached. “Future” is just a thought. It cannot be reached.

Your true nature is the timeless awareness from which the thought-based, time-bound story of you appears and disappears. This seeing ends the cycle of suffering and seeking.



-Scott Kiloby, Reflections of the One Life: Daily Pointers to Enlightenment