Have A New Year Without Seeking Happiness


Every new year, there is a slipping into meditation after midnight to receive a keynote for this rising wave in the ocean of time. The keynote for me this year was very clear: Repose without a search. Have a happy new year, but don't seek happiness.

Repose in the Knower who cannot be known, the Being who cannot be experienced. Give up the spiritual quest for any kind of "experience," because happiness is not an experience.

Happiness is not an experience of God, Guru, or Lover; not an experience of "higher consciousness" or visions or groovy tantric sex; not an experience of extreme sport or mountaintop; nor even of compassionate service to humanity. All such events happen "out there," through objects that arise and vanish into memory.

Through any such experience, we touch Truth only vicariously, second-hand, in the realm of body, senses, mind. Yes, even thoughts are vanishing objects "out there."

Truth is not what vanishes into memory. Truth is not what must be repeated or refreshed by another trip to the ashram, another lover, another drug, another meditation technique, another wilderness trek, a trip to the sacred mountain, a Yoga pose. Truth cannot be refreshed, because anything that needs refreshment must have been lost, and anything that can be lost is "out there," in the shadow realm of experience.

Truth is the emptiness where every experience that could be sought or found has arisen and dissolved like a mirage. Truth is the silence where every thought has formed and disappeared like a cloud in blue sky. The world of the senses is a lightning bolt, here and gone. But in what still space of Truth, in what vastness, did it flash?

The space of Truth is who you are, your very awareness in repose. Unseen, the one who looks. Unknown, the one who knows. Truth is a marvelous motionless explosion of transparency, expanding from an empty inward depth more intimate to You than your next thought. Let Truth sparkle without any quest for it, because there is no "it."

May this new year, this new day, this new breath arise from your heart of silence, right where you are this moment. May bold successful action arise in joyful waves from this stillness. Repose in the Truth I Am without a search. Be now what you've been looking for, and bless the world.

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