The Seed
You will never find lasting contentment.
There is always going to be a sense of something missing.
It was this realization that totally transformed my relationship with reality.
Up until that point I had operated on a fundamental belief that I was moving towards a completeness - a wholeness - of self, of circumstances, of experience, of life. I believed that all that was needed was a proper understanding, a clear realization, a final moment of epiphany - like laying down the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle and seeing the whole picture come to life.
Now I see things in a whole new way.
Completeness and incompleteness, wholeness and lack, ‘enough’ and ‘not enough’ - are the different faces of being. Different ways the same isness shows up as experience. Just as with the breath - inhale, and your lungs feel full…but only for a few moments. Then the impulse to exhale arrives with increasing urgency - and upon exhaling the lungs are depleted. The feeling of lack returns, driving the urge to inhale again - to move towards completeness again.
Life circumstances rarely satisfy for long. Even if we have achieved everything we set out to achieve. Great wealth. Loving families. Wisdom. Reputation. Deep insight. Peace of mind. Yet, somehow the passage of time begins to erode the very fullness those circumstances brought with them at first. A staleness, a hollowness, an emptiness, a dissatisfaction begins to gradually creep in.
This disturbs the mind because it defies its very logic. How can dissatisfaction find its way into the most satisfactory of situations? It is like painstakingly painting and rustproofing every inch of your car, washing and waxing it regularly - only to find spots where the rust has managed to creep in. The mind recoils when it sees the presence of dukkha even in the midst of a mindful, committed, and virtuous life.
It blames it on ingratitude - a complacency that has caused perspective to be lost. It redoubles its efforts to show gratitude. To become even more present, mindful, and vigilant to life’s simplicities. It pauses to smell flowers - or to thank the bees. It reflects frequently on the miracle of the body’s heartbeat, and of its breath. It takes the time to encounter people with genuine curiosity, compassion and interest.
And still…despite its valiant efforts…a familiar odor begins to waft in through the windows of perception. An odor, unpleasant yet so familiar - the stench of dissatisfaction.
The mind panics. What can it do to rid itself of this stench? A healthy bank account didn’t do it. A decades-long loving marriage didn’t do it. Raising loving children didn’t do it. A hundred thousand hours of meditation didn’t do it. Retreats, psychedelics, kundalini experiences, spiritual awakenings that totally rewired how we perceive ourselves - eventually none lasts for long. Even when attachments are surrendered, expectations of future outcomes relinquished - even when simplicity and humility have become the norm - dissatisfaction crawls back in like a cockroach after a nuclear holocaust.
Yet, again the mind believes this to be its failure to weed out the dissatisfaction at its very root. It goes in search of that root. It intensifies its practice. It retreats into the mountains. It undergoes austerities so severe, most others would balk at the prospect. It imposes self-isolation, renunciation, starvation - it takes body, mind, and spirit to the very brink to see if that elusive root of dissatisfaction will finally expose itself in that eleventh hour - when self-annihilation is imminent.
That is the path I followed. I imposed extreme deprivation upon myself to expose that root. And in that eleventh hour, when I had lost all faith that I would ever find it - it did reveal itself to me. But not in the form I had expected. I did not see the tip of a root - but a seed. The seed of satisfaction.
This perplexed me. How could the seed of satisfaction give rise to the weed of dissatisfaction? I looked again. And again. But it was unmistakable. It stared at me as clearly as the light of day. I wondered, then, could the opposite also be true? Could the seed of dissatisfaction give rise to the flower of satisfaction?
