Disguised as the Obvious

On the spiritual search we hear about something called our "true nature" and we also hear that the ego is an illusion - a problem we must somehow get rid of. Fascinated by this proposition we go about looking for a way to somehow dissolve the ego and then get hold of this thing called our true nature, awareness, being or any of the seductive terms we have heard about. The next thing we might hear is that we have to find out if our ego exists - to investigate the self and see where this “I” sense is coming from. However, when inquiring into the existence of a separate self, or “I”, the mind will simply not be satisfied with the answer it finds when it sees the unavoidable. Perhaps there will be a strained mental search, furiously scanning that field of experience which you think of as yourself, and yet nothing will turn up. Unsatisfied the mind will continue searching, irritated, like an insect flying up against a glass pane it is unable to see.

It is as if the mind were looking up at the heavens and asking “what number is the sky?”, always finding the only answer it can ever find - an empty blue expanse. Unsatisfied it continues puzzling, enquiring, desperately looking for the the right number - it must be a number, it thinks with certainty. Perhaps it then begins dreaming about what sort of number the sky might be - probably a really BIG number, it speculates, unable to accept or even notice the the vast expanse of blueness right in front of it.

Similarly, when investigating the reality of what you are with the expectation of finding an object, or thing, your conceptual mind will never accept the evidence that what you are is not a thing. The investigation is based on a false premise. The mind can never contain what you are - it can only attempt to make slippery mental image about it; offering a fleeting, highly unstable signifier known as a thought. As with the sky in the afore mentioned example, what you are in reality is like that obvious blue expanse which can never be reduced to a concept - certainly not the ‘number’ that the flawed question demands. Until you are willing to drop the expectation for the answer to look a certain way, you cannot find what is always disguised as the obvious. And when the expectation is dropped, before you lies the truth plain as day; open, available and effortlessly ever present like the heavens above. - Chad Barber