If we study the world around us, we see that everyone is searching for something. The scope of the pursuit and the intensity vary from person to person; some look casually for diversion or entertainment while others hunt furiously for the meaning of life; some search within the confines of known territory, while some in their chase throw everything to one side or the other and turn earth and heaven upside down.  Whatever its manifestation may be, it is that driving urge that causes the river of life to flow through our minds and hearts, and consequently powers the currents of civilization.

A mystic might say that we are engaged in a search for our self because we don’t know who we are; it is the result of natural human ignorance, and therefore the quest is universal. In our present time, though, because the world has lost sight of the wisdom of religion, the search for self has degraded into a quest for individuality.  The terms may sound similar, but individuality is a very different goal from self, one that leads in the opposite direction, into the shadows of a labyrinth and not out into the clarity of day.

Individuality cherishes difference, distinction and separateness; a person may live in a street where the houses are identical but will hang a flowerpot by the door or put an unusual vase in the window to show that this house is different from all the rest.  Similarly, we choose clothing and style our hair in ‘our own way.’  But these outward signs don’t endure – clothing grows old and falls apart, the vase in the window may be broken by the cat, and so on; in short, these transient forms do not provide the unshakeable certainty upon which we want to build our life.  We may try one structure and then another to define ourselves, but even when the forms have the appearance of spirituality, our efforts will always be in vain. To invest our energy in individuality is ultimately futile since separation leads to limitation, opposition and destruction; every individual will someday be forced to yield to another and whatever is composed will someday be decomposed.  Then individuality vanishes.

Religion, on the other hand, teaches the search for self.  The path begins by looking for the Divine – by whatever name – to Whom we ascribe all that we idealize, such as goodness, love, harmony, beauty, and the fundamental, all-pervading truth.  If we seek our ideal with sincerity, we will begin to perceive it like a trace of perfume wherever we go. As the Divine Self becomes more present for us, it becomes more beguiling and haunts our awareness, so that we naturally long to fall into its embrace and forget ourselves. Then it is a short step to the understanding that it is nothing more than our claim to individuality that keeps us apart from the One we seek.  And if, by Grace, the veil of ego is someday torn away, the vision of unity reveals that there is only One Self, the infinite Ocean, of which we are simply a passing wave; the apparent selfhood of the wave is but a momentary loan from the eternal Self of the Sea.

For the restless seeker, journeying through life in search of her- or himself, experimenting with a workshop here, a brush with the relics of a tribal culture there, shopping online for a personally assembled package of techniques that suits ‘me’ best, take heed – here is the only map that can lead you to the buried treasure: seek for God, and not for the fleeting bauble of whatever seems to affirm you. Don’t grasp the illusion – the further you are from God, the further you are from Self, and it was hunger for Self that put you on the path.  Trust that if you keep looking upward, you will find what you seek. That is the lesson of the saying in Gayan Alapas, “Make God a reality, and God will make you the truth.”