The Search

A friend just asked me: If the drive to search comes from within, are people who are happy or miserable, as the case may be, deep in UNreality land responsible for their failure to search or search hard enough or respond to awakening calls around them?

In a word, no. But the terms of the question make it unanswerable. The terms of the question smuggle in assumptions that are already false. The key word is "responsible".

"Responsible" implies that there is a standard of virtue, of goodness, and if you measure up to it then you are good, and if you don't, you are bad, and it is totally up to you. Some people do, and some people don't. Some people are responsible and some people are not. Those who are, are better than those who are not.

What we would like would be to congratulate ourselves for our spiritual attainments, for our consciousness, for our understanding. We want to approve of and love ourselves, and in this world of separation we need to have a reason. We cannot love and approve of ourselves unconditionally. In the Matrix essays I wrote that we cannot find what we are looking for through searching, yet it is the search that allows us to be found. So if someone has not been found, we can blame them, right? They just aren't searching hard enough. We are, and they are not. We are better than they are.

One of the commonest phrases of judgement is: "So-and-so could at least make an effort..." We stand in disdainful disapproval of the ignorance of others, thinking that we, in their shoes, would not be so ignorant, so apathetic, so irresponsible. This thought gives us license to approve of ourselves.

The truth is that all of us are, in one way or another, in Unreality Land. We are all sojourners on the walk into separation and back to reunion. Each of us explores a unique part of that territory. Some of those explorations take a very long time, requiring total immersion in a deep realm of what you call Unreality. We each spend exactly as much time there as necessary to complete the experience. When the experience is almost complete, we get restless. Its reality wears thin and we sense a larger realm awaiting us. This is when the Search begins. It does not and cannot begin before then. If you see some children having a game of make-believe, you don't pull them out of it before the game is finished.

If you are a crusader for truth, in whatever political, social, or psychological realm, by all means continue to broadcast your message. These days there are many restless people. Unreality Land is falling apart; it isn't coherent anymore. More and more people crave a new way of understanding things. There are many people searching: knowing the world they've accepted isn't quite right, not knowing what they are looking for but knowing it is there. But as you broadcast your truth, don't condemn those who just don't get it. It is not through any failing or inferiority that they aren't interested. They aren't supposed to get it. They are at a different phase of the cycle of growth, perhaps the phase of exploring and growing into a new realm. We don't rip a baby from the womb before it is ready (well, we do, but that's a separate issue!)

I am also NOT saying that those in "Unreality Land" are babies and we are more mature. The cycle of birth, growth, confinement, death, and birth repeats endlessly, within each biographical lifetime and beyond it, overlapping across many areas of life. Someone can be highly evolved in one area of consciousness and an ogre in another. But even this explanation can be misleading. It isn't that there are a given number of life subjects, as in school, and we progress or "evolve" upward in each of them. While there are some commonalities, essentially each of us has taken on a curriculum that is unique. You could even say that those most deeply immersed in unreality, in the world of separation, are the most heroic. They have explored the painful reaches of separation the most deeply, and have the longest road back. That takes courage.

When someone is ready to transition into truth, he will attract someone or something into his life to provide the necessary experience or information. Maybe that someone is you! A teacher or a healer is called, and the appropriate attitude is one of humble gratitude for being the agent of another person's self-teaching or self-healing. What you provide might not even be the "truth" in any absolute sense. It is merely something that a person needs right now to make a transition.

Let me give just one example. For some people I knew in high school, Marxism was the "truth" that brought them into an expanded reality. It brought them out of an inwardly focused, depressive rage into a broader, more encompassing understanding of the impersonal origins of the wrongness in the world. They grew and thrived, for a time, in the worldview of Marxism, until eventually it too grew confining. That is how it works: what was initially liberating eventually becomes limiting. The same happens quite often with cults, spiritual groups, religious groups, activist movements, and so on. We progress from to broader and broader understandings, staying in each world exactly as long as is necessary.