To be a human being is to seek. There is a part in us that is incessantly seeking something. We are never not looking. When we start out in life, we have inside of us this longing, this seeking, and we look for something that will answer whatever it is that has come into us that says it needs something in order to complete itself.
For example, I'm eighteen years old, and into my mind comes the idea that I need a beautiful girl. I'm twenty-four years old, and into my mind comes the idea that I've got to be able to pay for what that beautiful girl wants. Into me comes a certain kind of desire. An energy moves into me, and as it moves into me, from within the content of my own experience as a human being (culture, traditions), then comes a picture in my mind of what will answer this part that has been awakened, and my thought is: "I need this. I want that. This is what I have to have."
We go through our lives in a continual dance of being filled with something that needs an answer, and then going out and finding that answer . . . only to find out that our answer wasn't quite the answer. Then, as we bring to ourselves whatever we thought we needed, it changes. Or, as we actually see that it doesn't fulfill us, then the thing inside of us that wants this answer changes.
Slowly but surely, we reach the point where we understand that this change, this movement of the part inside of us that always has what it needs in mind, is itself not the basis for providing an answer, but turns out to be the basis of our dissatisfaction.
If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there's no peace it. Every time we find the peace that it promises by answering this nascent desire -- this movement that comes into us -- then we go here and there, and we always wind up eventually with the feeling of sand running through our fingers . . . if not by the thing actually falling apart, then by the very nature of time.
That feeling that comes into us, the vibration itself, is in time. It is form. Because it is matter, it actually begins to loosen its grip. As it loosens its grip, lo and behold, we want to get rid of whatever we were holding onto. Have you ever been on the receiving end of somebody telling you, "You are everything to me. I don't know what I'd do without you," and then that feeling leaves that person, and he or she leaves you? That's part of the human experience.
Eventually we reach the point where we start to realize that we are not going to find peace, contentment, happiness, strength, fearlessness -- all of the things that in our heart of hearts we wish we had -- outside of us. It isn't there. That may sound like a simple idea, but we have to go through thousands of painful experiences before we start to realize that it's not a matter of looking in the wrong place, but that while there is something in me that says it knows what it's looking for, I can see it doesn't know what it's looking for. Then begins a completely new stage in our journey.
Because of the way this beautiful universe -- run by a beautiful Intelligence -- works, we then run into what it is that we begin to understand. First it was these individual desires, individual selves, the "I's" that had to have what they called on to complete themselves. Then, slowly we realize that there must be something that can complete the whole of that nature -- not the things it calls out that need to be completed, but to bring to fruition the entire process that will put to peace that nature we have been subjected to because we have been asleep to how divided it is when we are in its hands.