HOW THE SEARCH WORKS
Adi Da Samraj, 1974
Adi Da Samraj (Bubba Free John): It has been the case more or less with many people. Their lives are usually quite well recorded and they weren’t happy people. Their search was not over. The very things that you can think of animating yourself toward, having ultimate bucks, all the rest of it you see, they had those things given to them by their circumstance and still, they were unhappy. Still, they were self-possessed.
So even if you achieved what you are seeking to achieve by your various means, having achieved it, it wouldn’t be over. But in the meantime, since you haven’t achieved it, you can imagine that that achievement would bring it all to an end and you would be just a happy man you see. Well is that not the illusion of seeking in general?
“It is especially those ones that can take you a long time or forever that are the hangers”
You have little searches that can be attained in the next moment and you have bigger ones that take a little while longer and you have immense ones that take you forever. It is especially those ones that can take you a long time or forever that are the hangers because you can keep them out in front of you as promises that maybe will prove that the search is alright that it can amount to the ultimate union, ultimate fulfillment, ultimate release. So it’s especially the unattainable or the not yet attained that’s the hang-up.
How often has it been said about people in their romantic and sexual gamings that the ones that stay on your mind are the ones that you didn’t get to do it with, the ones with whom it didn’t quite work out you see? It’s the unachievable ones that seem to support your illusions most. So you keep those going too you see. That’s the game of the salesman. That’s the game of the ego.
This is how you prevent yourself from finding out that you’re just a seeker and the search is based on pain and is founded on the act of separation and cannot be fulfilled. This is how you keep yourself from finding this out because you project some of your searches on such a large scale that you can’t prove the point, something like physicists these days who are theorizing about forces that are so immense that they can’t conduct an experiment to prove their theories or disprove them.
So the search is something like that then. The hangers are the unachievable ones, the ones where you can’t do the experiment to find out, the ones that you can’t just glance at and know that it’s all pain and cannot be fulfilled. Of course you can but you project these things out in front of you in order to support your illusion but you don’t have to get down to really understanding what I’m talking about.
Whereas with the sexual search it is, you know, what you can do with someone. You know what you can do with your present partner. But you don’t know what you could do with everybody (laughter).
You know damn well you can’t be fulfilled with your present partner or everybody you’ve ever been with. But you think if you could just do it with everybody or at least a lot of them, then you’d be fulfilled. This is how the search works. You put off the understanding of it by projecting it into such a large or impossible scale that you can’t prove the point.
Oh yes,yes I know. In my present intimacy everything you’re saying, that’s completely plain to me now. I can see that definitely but there could be somebody or there could be some fifty in which it would be alright. So you keep skipping off the understanding.
You see in the context of the limitations that are excruciating or most present time that you’re not doing it but you keep suggesting to yourself oh there’s something else though. I can still seek in some way and on a larger scale maybe with somebody else, whatever it may be and maybe then it works out see? So you avoid the understanding.
If you can’t feel good in this moment when could you feel good? How is it possible to feel good if you can’t feel good now? Well maybe you feel some peripheral okay but apart from that disturbed, essentially in pain, essentially under stress feeling a subtle but profound frustration, disease, in this circumstance.
The circumstance doesn’t account for it. There’s nothing about the circumstance producing that. You are. It’s what you do. Nobody’s doing it. The environment isn’t doing it. I’m not doing it. The circumstance is not doing it. You are doing it, nobody else, nothing else, just you.