On the desperate pain of endless seeking

INITIATION?

The year was 2004.

Blindfolded, knees knocking, heart beating fast, maddening images of terror flashing through my imagination, I sat in the cold lobby, waiting for the initiation to start.

It was the first of many I’d undergo.

Maybe it was the sense of adventure, or the unfathomable curiosity about the unknown that drove my quest.

I wanted to become a wizard, a sorcerer, a magus filled with power coursing through my fingertips to morph and change reality to suit my will and whims.

It was the battle cry of a weak and defenseless ego trying to simultaneously shield itself and sing it’s barbaric yawps over the rooftops, however crackled and shrill it sounded.

My guess was that my initiators would unveil a vicious magical dagger, wave it through the air, and slice open reality—revealing to me exactly how everything in reality was held together.

Then, I thought, they’d give me my own piece of that power.

FINDING THE BODY ELECTRIC

Flash forward to 2006. Five initiations later and I found myself laying in an extremely cold bedroom in rural Wyoming, giving myself a “Radical Undoing” session from a weird old book I’d found—one among thousands that weak ego of mine had collected and turned into a suit of armor against reality.

At the conclusion of that inexplicable session, I found my body trembling more than it ever had in years of 30-degrees-below-zero-Fahrenheit winter nights in my Minnesota childhood.

Pen gripped in my tetany’d fists, I scrawled these words into a tiny Moleskine journal:

“This is what it feels like to be alive!”

Even now, writing these words, I still tremble with the power of that first experience. That was the day I discovered my body.

I’ll spare you the details of the polite dinner conversation I had with my friend’s family shortly after that session.

What I will tell you is that it’s not always the best idea to try to convince your friend’s family to try a body meditation experience from a book called Secrets of Western Tantra…

BEGINNING IN AN ENDING

The discovery of my body welcomed a perfect storm that cascaded, washed, and crashed through every aspect of my former life.

The most important part of that storm was the fatal lightning strike that left all those books in flames—along with the fundamental assumption I’d never questioned that had driven every single action of my life up to that point.

The assumption that something’s wrong with me, and with the world and the corollary belief that I’ve got to fix it were the fuel that finally filled my self-imposed prison of words with exhaust fumes until I finally broke free, screaming and crying and laughing hysterically.

DEATH OF THE SEEKER

The seeker in me had found what it was looking for through all those books and initiations and experiences.

That’s not entirely true. 

What really happened was the seeker died when I realized the quest was over before it got started.

The purpose behind the quest dissolved into deep bodily awareness. There was nothing and no one to find. I was it, all along.

The thing doing the seeking was the thing it was looking for all along, but the eye can’t see itself.

It’s time to ask yourself what all that spiritual knowledge, all those high emotional experiences, all the books and websites and videos have really taught you.

What good does learning another new vocabulary to describe more words to describe basic, simple experience really do?

All those “spiritual” words and meanings and purposes obscure your clear view of the majesty and adventure that is already your life, if you’d only seize it and live it!

ON THE FOLLY OF THE SEEKER LIFESTYLE

Let’s flashback to caveman times for a moment. You lived in a band or tribe, and everyone relied on everyone else for survival. If the group rejected you for not fitting in, you were 99% certain to die a brutal death rather quickly.

Flash forward to present time.

You share the same body as that cavemen who came before us, but live in very different circumstances.

Now, rejection of the group doesn’t mean much besides a little sadness or embarrassment.

However, that rejection also comes with an unconscious survival threat that feels very real—even though it’s not.

It’s that fear of rejection that pushes us to fit in at all costs—even the most expensive cost of losing your own individuality in trade for acceptance and validation from one group or another.

When your identity and personality become dependent on the now very popular seeker lifestyle, actually finding what you set out to discover generates that very same survival threat.

Briefly, your very survival depends on you fitting in, conforming, and remaining a part of the seeker groupings you’re a part of.

You trade away your own individuality and give up any chance of ever finding yourself because of a primitive survival threat that exists nowhere but in your head.

The seeker lifestyle of the yogis, occultists, mystics, religious groups, political associations, and others keeps you locked up tight in a prison of words, ideas, and expectations that you’ve got to constantly manipulate and lie to yourself to live up to.

Instead of living your own organic, flowing, mysterious life, you get caught up in a predictable template of behaviors, ideas, and responses to life that keep you from ever seeing, feeling, or hearing anything but the echo of your desperate thoughts inside your cell.

THE GOOD NEWS

This all seems rather tragic, and by now you’ve already begun your defense of your flavor of the seeker lifestyle—but even that defense is just a programmed template reaction, and the organic, flowing part of you knows it, right here, right now.

There’s a deeper voice inside you crying out to be heard, if only you could get past the noise and the fear of finally letting your own perception and experience take it’s rightful throne as the sole sovereign in your life.

You are the most important person in your life.

Period.

That prison of seeking that’s kept you away from your true nature this whole time seems impenetrable, intractable, and sometimes even desirable when compared to the unknown wilds outside of it.

What’s fascinating about it is that it never really existed in the first place. It’s all made up.

There’s nothing that can prevent you from being who you were created to be. It’s only thoughts and ideas that keep you from seeing, feeling, and experiencing that truth for yourself.

You only think you need external acceptance and authority. But who is it that chooses to accept that authority in the first place?

You’re the final arbiter on everything in your life, and that’s a scary and awesome fact to realize.

As Vernon Howard once said, “Thank God the show is over!”

The only real step in front of you is now—and has always been—the leap of faith into 100% self acceptance.

It looks just like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indy has to make a step off a cliff edge, and it seems certain he’ll fall to his death…

At Command Z we call that 100% Juice.

Once you’ve taken that step, the world—even all of creation—becomes yours to explore and enjoy.

All those goals and aspirations you once had to fix things and make yourself OK will just fall away.

What remains is the constant, endless, and beautiful adventure that’s your birthright.

Everything you do from that point forward will be for the sheer joy of experience, and nothing more.

If you’re ready to take that step, I encourage you to get into the weekly Radical Undoing sessions, so you can overcome the desperate pain of endless seeking, just like I did.

Here’s how:

https://radicalundoing.com/ngf-weekly/

All good things,

-Garrett