Who Am I? – The Spiritual Road Most Traveled
How Inquiry Leads Us Beyond ‘What’s Missing?’
One common dynamic that brings many to the spiritual path is seeking greater fulfillment, wholeness, or completeness. Or, perhaps more accurately, a more enduring sense of fulfillment, wholeness, or completeness. Most human beings have had some experience of these states but suffer from the transitory, impermanent nature of experience.
When we experience wholeness, we seem to recognize the experience. We say, “I feel ‘whole’ or ‘more complete.’ The words to describe our experience arise naturally because we ‘know the experience.’
Even when we feel incomplete, not fulfilled, or an emptiness that we might use the words – something’s missing – to describe our sense of ourselves or our life, we often have a sense of what will fill the ‘missing space’ within – wholeness, completeness, fulfillment.
Something in us knows or has a sense of ‘what’s missing’ or what we’re seeking.
What’s your sense of ‘what’s missing’? Are you still seeking?
When life brings us to the spiritual path (seeking something deeper, more real, more true within us), we often arrive frustrated. Frustrated from too many tastes of what we seek but unable to embody or integrate the experience in a way that makes it a permanent part of our life. We approach what’s missing, like lunch or dinner – something to be consumed to make it part of us.
Buddha recognized the cycle of seeking and frustration as the very nature of suffering. Can the cycle be broken? Obviously so, as a multitude sages have told us.
In the Diamond Approach, a beginning step is to take a rest from seeking and shift to understanding – and the place to start is right where we are, right now. When we feel the ‘missing,’ that empty space within, we don’t go seeking. We inquire – into the ‘missing place’. What is the phenomenology of that place/space? We need to get out of our heads and into our bodies – where the space of “missing” is.
Inquiring into the immediacy of our experience brings us into more intimacy with ourselves. The more intimate we are with ourselves, the closer we are to what is real within us. The closer we find ourselves to what we really are, the more the ‘what’s missing’ evaporates through the process of understanding.
If you go about investigating what is missing with sincerity and truthfulness and curiosity, you will start to find out about it. Your love affair with knowing what you are will deepen. What you find out will not necessarily be a solution to your problem, but a realization of who you are. And the problem fades away in some way. A. H. Almaas – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery
A Diamond Approach teacher helps students to develop the art of open and open-ended inquiry and to engage in a process of understanding that focuses not on what’s missing or what is desired, but on ‘what am I right now?’ Right now is where we are. Right now is what is happening. Right now is where reality and life are.