The End of Suffering is Often the Motivation for Coming to Satsang - 22 Apr 2016

Father, I think here it is still someone trying to get something and then end suffering. I think here it is still as someone trying to get something, that something being an end to suffering, because I noticed recently there was an expectation of love—not devotional love—and also to the feeling it is more not motivated by finding out who I am. Well, to expose this, Father, actually no, still just a belief that then someone exists.

If you can say that there is some motivation in this beginning of this spiritual search for self-discovery, the most common motivation is this one: 'I don't want to suffer anymore. I want it easy.' And most spiritual paths are full of practices and concepts and teachings which help us to come to the end of suffering. In satsang like these, we've come to this directness where we can say, 'Oh, suffering... the cause of suffering is only the belief in an idea about myself.' How do we give this belief to ideas about ourselves? Only by believing our thoughts. No idea about myself is really about myself, not about my true Self. All ideas are about this personal identity. So anytime we pick up an idea about ourselves, we are picking up some personal identity because all ideas are personal. Even the idea that 'I still only want freedom from suffering and not self-discovery' is an idea about who? It's about an entity, a seeming entity which does not exist. Easy.

So you say, 'But here it is still as someone trying to get something,' and what you mean is that you're believing in the existence of this someone which you yourself said is just a belief that this someone exists. But there is nobody like this. There is nobody called Shivani; there is nobody called Ananta in reality. And we looked and we looked and we looked for this somebody and we found that it does not exist. So how can this non-existent nobody come to the end of suffering? The suffering is only the idea, the belief that this nobody actually can come into existence.

And as long as we bind to the existence of this somebody, then it is bound to come with some expectations. How should this somebody's life be like? What should he or she have in their life? What should not come? What should come? The belief in my existence as a somebody is the root of all suffering. And we've checked so often now, we know that, and we are finding ourselves to be this nameless, formless one. So upon looking, we do not find this one which wants something or doesn't want something, and we find ourselves to be this nameless, formless one. This is what we find because we see that all appearances are appearing to that one which is nameless and formless—just the awareness itself.

This is the comedy of life. We never find the one that we always presume ourselves to be, and the one that we truly find every time we check, we are in constant denial of that. We never find the person. If I tell any of you, 'Let's find the person,' we start looking, looking, looking—it's so much hard work and you still don't find. And yet that gets our allegiance. And that which we do find—we look at all that is appearing, we find that 'I am' here is awareness itself which is untouched by any appearance—this we want to deny because there is so much belief in the identity. So satsang is where we come to break this belief in the false identity.