Hide and seek

I've been thinking a lot about you lately. Not the highly focused version of you that shows up for our Remind Guide sessions, but the everyday you. The one who wakes up in the morning, maybe a bit groggy, already feeling the weight of the day's responsibilities. The you that gets stressed out about work, health, politics. The one that gets bumped into on the street and feels a momentary flash of irritation. The you that finds yourself doom scrolling through your YouTube feed at 2 AM, wondering where the time went.

I've been contemplating how we lose ourselves in the mundane moments of life, how we fail to recognize the immediate directness of our true nature in these everyday experiences. It's so easy to get caught up in the internal dialogue, isn't it? That constant chatter that keeps us in a state of perpetual seeking, of dissatisfaction, of feeling that this experience, right here and now, isn't quite enough.

So, I thought I'd share some thoughts on where we tend to hide from ourselves most often. Maybe you'll recognize some of these hiding places. Maybe you're in one right now.

Time is a big one. There's a reason why, in our conversations, I often ask you to explain what remains if you can't go to either the past or the future. Both past and future aren't reality - they're just memories or anticipations, mind stuff that we get tangled in. The realization we're talking about, the one we're seeking, can only happen in the immediate now, in this eternally present moment.

I know, I know. That sounds like another concept, doesn't it? But hear me out. If you want to hide from the subtle directness of reality, time is a great place to do it. And if you want to find yourself again, try retracting back to the immediate experience of this exact moment. Finding it isn't about remembering where you were before. It's not about planning how you'll get there in the future. It takes literally no time to find it, and it's always found right now.

Then there's the story we tell ourselves. Most of us assume we're living within a narrative, a series of events that happened in a sequence, that make up a coherent whole. As if somehow the description of a period of time and series of events had any real weight to what's happening in reality. Within this story lives an illusion of a person, of a journey, and we average out periods of time to conclude how we're "doing." We tell that story to ourselves and we tell it to other people, solidifying that perspective every time.

But you're not actually living within a period of time that can be described in general terms and judged. Whenever you start telling yourself a story of you, going through life, being on a path, you're already dealing with figments of imagination. No story and no journey leads you to the directness we're talking about. The directness is what persists before you start weaving a story of a world inhabited by identities and describing the dynamics between them.

Emotions are another great hiding place. Be it anxiety, sadness, anger, or even a blissful state, we get completely immersed in living within these feelings as if they were handed to us fully formed. We're programmed to construct intricate conceptual feelings from very immediate emotional reactions. We linger on feelings that initially were reactions to direct stimuli but over time remain as conceptual baggage that we somehow feel we need to carry.

We were never obliged to feel anything for extended periods of time. It isn't natural at all. To many people, seeking is a very intellectual process, but releasing our emotions can be treated exactly the same way as releasing beliefs. I don't personally equate feelings to thoughts because they seem to carry additional substance, an energetic quality if you will. However, just as we can enter a non-conceptual space, we can be in a non-emotional domain. What are you without this feeling? Or what is that feeling exactly? Can you unpack what it is that you're really feeling? Most often than not, they're conceptual patterns we seem to be stuck on.

And then there's the actual seeking. Our tendency to look for the profound, the borderline ecstatic, completely missing out on the subtle, powerful underpinnings at the ground of our conscious experience. We think ecstatic revelations are the unit of our progress on the spiritual path, and we're calibrated to focus on looking for experiences of extreme magnitude. But the only real thing we can find, the only one that isn't a concept, an artificially created spiritual goal with a set of parameters that's supposed to describe its quality, is, at first glance, the most ephemeral, subtle thing.

The border between living a fantasy and breathing reality isn't necessarily a tremendous chasm but sometimes a rather gentle drift into the fog. What if being here is not a palpable shift but a gentle transition?

So, my friend, as you go about your day, as you find yourself caught in time, wrapped up in your story, tangled in emotions, or searching for the profound, remember this: the directness, the clarity, the peace you're seeking - it's always here. It's in the immediacy of this moment, before the stories, before the emotions, before the search for something more. You're perfectly equipped to experience that happening continuously. Everything is, in a way, orchestrated perfectly for that very moment to happen.

And if you find yourself lost, if you find yourself hiding, that's okay too. Just gently bring yourself back to this, to here. To the simplicity of being. To the directness that's always here, always now. In the end, that's where you'll find what you've been seeking all along.