The single greatest thing you can ever find is not a thing. It is not an object. It is not anything objective whatsoever. You can keep on discovering new objects till the cows come home or the Kali Yuga ends in a rapture of Advaitin insight. These objects can by anything gross to subtle -- new scientific truths, transformative insights, the perfect lover (who shatters your dreams six months later), bright shiny new concepts that change your life, a bigger, better flat screen TV, a new political paradigm, an inspiring yoga teacher, an enemy who causes you to extend genuine forgiveness. Of course, some objects feel a whole lot better to discover than others. Much better to meet a great friend than a neighborhood bully, a healing sauna than a polluted river, a new puppy than a newly elected official.
But no object, good, bad, ugly or pretty will ever liberate you or awaken you to the pathless noumenon of Truth. Forget heroin, virtually all of us are object junkies. Allen Ginsberg used the term "matter junkies." We are so fixated on and attached to objects and object relations that 'we' are convinced it is we who are better when the objects with which we most identify (our own body-minds foremost) are doing better and 'we' are worse when those objects are ailing, failing or disappearing. Just this is Samsara and it is rife with suffering. Identification of who we are with the objects of which we are aware is the mind generated wrong view that leads to the apparent event of getting knocked on our asses every time. I throw the word 'apparent' in there because I don't mean the true 'we'.
The true we is the Awareness Singularity
“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside.” -- Rumi, 13th Century
But no object, good, bad, ugly or pretty will ever liberate you or awaken you to the pathless noumenon of Truth. Forget heroin, virtually all of us are object junkies. Allen Ginsberg used the term "matter junkies." We are so fixated on and attached to objects and object relations that 'we' are convinced it is we who are better when the objects with which we most identify (our own body-minds foremost) are doing better and 'we' are worse when those objects are ailing, failing or disappearing. Just this is Samsara and it is rife with suffering. Identification of who we are with the objects of which we are aware is the mind generated wrong view that leads to the apparent event of getting knocked on our asses every time. I throw the word 'apparent' in there because I don't mean the true 'we'.
The true we is the Awareness Singularity
“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside.” -- Rumi, 13th Century