The impulse to seek runs deeper than any object could satisfy, because the Great Search is predicated on the presumption of separation. It can never be fulfilled. It can only be undermined.
Ask yourself: is there anything that is preventing you from being completely at peace and fulfilled now? Do not just search in your mind for something that may be preventing you, but go deeply into your experience. Is there anything at a deeper level, some energetic impulse of seeking, longing, desiring, resisting? However noble your seeking may be, even the search for enlightenment or God, is there any impulse of seeking or resisting in you?
And if there is some residual impulse of seeking or longing, even though you may not be able to formulate what exactly it is you seek or long for, even if it is just an existential impulse of seeking, of becoming, understand that whatever it is you are seeking must be something that is not present now. If it were present now in your experience, you would not be seeking it. It must be something that you hope to attain or experience in the future. It must be something that will start at some time in the future. But if it is something that starts, it will by definition stop. If it is something you acquire, it is by definition something that you will lose.
Happiness, enlightenment, God, however you formulate the object of your search, cannot be something that is found in the future. If it is not present now, it is not worth seeking. Can you imagine King Lear searching for the actor John Smith who plays him? Can you imagine a wave searching for water?
Don’t be like the person who, after six months of looking forward to their holiday, finally arrives on the Caribbean beach but doesn’t get off the bus.
The path, the journey, the trajectory that most people take starts with the conventional path, the search for happiness in the world, which in time evolves into the Progressive Path, which in turn evolves into the Direct Path, which in turn evolves into the Pathless Path.
Sooner or later, one way or another, all paths culminate in the Pathless Path: self-abidance, resting in being, as being. Simply being. And as you stand in being, as being, you may notice that your being seems to expand, occasionally suddenly but usually gradually, losing the qualities that it previously borrowed from the content of experience. And as it expands, it accommodates more and more within itself, until at some point it is revealed as the one infinite being of which the entire universe and everything it contains is an appearance. In other words, you stand at the very heart of the universe.
Just as the space in your room is not really confined within four walls but is the one vast space of the universe, so your being is not really contained within your body but is the one infinite being within which everything and everyone moves and lives and has its apparent existence.
