chasing phantom treasure

We find ourselves very often chasing phantom treasure. We keep falling for it–the future is where we will find this treasure. No matter how often you seem to “get” it, a new it to get pops up. Why don’t we consider the radical possibility that treasure is looking for treasure?

If that is allowed as a possibility, then treasure can discover itself. No looking outward or impossibly forward in time.

That’s the point of this story: Ten folks set off on a pilgrimage in ancient India. The come to a great river, with a treacherous crossing. Once across the leader of this group decides to count everybody to make sure they all made it across safely. The man could only count nine people. He began searching for the tenth person. He split them up in different groups, six and three, five and four seven and two, and still could only come up with nine.

An old fisherman sitting on the banks mending his net pointer to the “seeker” and said to him “You are the tenth person. The seeker is the sought.”

At that point, as in all good spiritual stories, the seeker woke up to his true nature.

We imagine we will find what we are seeking outside ourselves, and go looking everywhere for this elusive and final satisfaction, all the while neglecting the seeker, our self. Rather than an Object to be sought, the goal of spiritual practice is a Subject to be experienced.

We are already what we are seeking. Seeking compounds the problem–creating phantom treasure, as seeking implies we do not already have what we are seeking.

The seeker and the sought belong to this illusion-making apparatus, evolutionarily designed for survival, that creates a “me” and everything else that is not me.

Allow for a moment the radical possibility that there is no gap between who we are and what we are seeking.

It’s all just timeless wonder and mystery. It’s absolutely delightful when you drop the impulse to squirm out of totality and simply be.

“From the beginning, all beings are Buddha; Like water and ice, without water no ice, Outside us, no Buddhas. How near the Truth, yet how far we seek?”
Hakuin Zenji (1686 1769)