The Seekers Equation
Our modern world appears very different than it was even fifty years ago. The differences become more pronounced the further back we go. The differences one finds are not inherently good or bad though there is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from huge advances in science and technology. We live longer, eat better, have better medical care and have created all manner of gadgets that make life easier.
One would think that as the depth and breadth of our knowledge grew we would have also become more self aware and in control of ourselves and take better care of the world. Some of this has happened; however, most of our attention has been directed towards all our technological advances and what we can do with them. This has not helped us as a whole to be happier, more balanced or in tune with the world around us.
If our modern technologies is all it took to make us happier we would be living in a utopia, which is obviously not the case. This begs the question "why aren't we?" Those who would like to solve this mysterious puzzle face the seeker equation.
The seekers equation is not a mathematical equation as the term is more a metaphor. If I tried to put this in even a semi-mathematical form I would put "We are not happy/balanced" on one side of the "=" sign and why we are not on the other. The short answer to why we are not happy or balanced and not living in a utopia is because virtually all of our focus has been on the external world - towards our physical self and doings. The problem with living this way is we are not just physical beings. We are consciousness first and physical beings second. While we have resolved many of the physical challenges we have faced we have not done so with the internal ones.
We are still dealing with the same issues we have for millennia. People remain focused on themselves, the "I" if you will. While we can do marvelous things with our technology we are still beings who have thoughts and feelings and continue to struggle with both. We fight over "things", seek to control, want and seek attention and affection and become hurt and angry or worse when we do not get them. These issues arise out of the nature of our existence, primarily the egos we create in our minds.
Our ego creates the constructed "I" and by its perception appear to be completely physically separate and distinct from each other though we are not. We are beings of consciousness who have taken on a vehicle of flesh and bone to exist in the physically manifest world and are connected to not just each other but the Earth we live on and the Cosmos itself.
Our physical aspect takes the bulk of our attention hence the other aspects of the self are mostly unexplored and undeveloped. When we focus our attention without we do not perceive how we connected to the world around us. Physical reality is a distracting one that keeps our attention focused without.
We base too much on our physical self, our thoughts and our emotions, and place to much value on owning things, being liked, admired, cared about or loved. All too many seek approval and rather than focusing on having enough to live a good life desire and chase after more money and more things as if attaining them will make us happy.
We want.... that is our mind and the ego within it has us wanting. The problem with this is it ignores our true inner self. If we want to find happiness, balance or peace we must also turn some of our attention away from our physicality and explore the uncharted wilderness within. We will never attain these things by remaining externally focused.
Once we accepts the idea that we should not solely focus on the external the question becomes how do we explore the wilderness within? How do we take our eyes off the glamour of the physical world and put it on something we know little to nothing about? We know that we use thinking and reasoning to solve problems in the "real world" and we rely almost exclusively on these types of doings. But, these are not skills we can use to explore within ourselves.
Fundamentally the external world is a world of doing and the internal one is one of being. We know how to do quite well, but come up woefully short on how to simply be. It is learning to be that is our challenge. When we start work on being more and doing less we also start growing and expanding our awareness. This may have you wondering if this is a hyperbole or is it actually possible?
In mathematics there is a term "degrees of freedom" which is basically as follows:
"The number of degrees of freedom in a situation basically tells you how many independent equations you'll need to completely understand the situation from a mathematical point of view."
There are two elements to this. The first being the obvious one in that the more variables there are the more equations you need to solve for any one of the variables. In terms of the seeker what this means is that, whether we are trying to deal with an issue or to come to understand and better know ourselves, we are working in a "system" that has literally hundreds if not thousands of variables.
The variables I am referring to include aspects of our minds such as the thoughts we hold (whether we are conscious of them or not), how our thoughts connected/related, what we are conscious of and our emotions and so on. It also includes what we are experiencing at the time and all the variables that are aspects of it such as time, place, who's present, what we are doing at the time that are aspects of it. On top of this we change with every experience so even the equations themselves are not static.
The combinations of all these variables affect our choices moment, most of which go completely unnoticed. The consequence of this is simple, the less mindful we are in the moment the less we notice, which makes growth and awakening harder and take longer. This leads us to the second element of how the notion of degrees of freedom affect our growth. By this I am referring to how focusing our attention externally or without limits our awareness and growth.
We are far more than just physical beings who have thoughts and experience emotions. However, we tend to exist almost solely thought them, our lowest aspects. When it comes to degrees of freedom the capabilities and possibilities of our lower aspects are to our higher ones as two dimensional space is to three or perhaps even four. If we consider this we see that while we have worked hard to understand certain aspects of the "human equation", the external ones, we have mostly ignored the most important ones - the inner ones related to our core self or consciousness.
Given that we have not and perhaps even cannot transcended the laws of physics or chemistry, at least with our current understanding of them, our focus on the external has not added to our degrees of freedom. When you multiply a fraction with another fraction you get a smaller fraction, and this is what we have been doing.
We have not been expanding our awareness, we have allowed it to contract trapping us in an external focus. We typically try to find happiness by looking "without"; however, unless this is driven from within, rather than without using our thoughts and the emotions they give rise to, doing so takes us further away from ourselves.
Growth becomes harder when we have confined ourselves. It is difficult to be creative when everything is defined... creativity needs room to breathe. The challenge is that no one can explain how to get beyond the confines of the thoughts we have created in our minds. We can show others how to do but not how to be. Making this shift is something we must do for ourselves. The only thing that others can do is share techniques that can help and encourage us to take more time from our focus on our lower aspects - our minds, emotions and physicality. The question that remains is... how do we do this?
Consider our rational or conscious mind and how we use it. We use our powers of observation, our thinking and reasoning skills along with our imagination to find ways to resolve issues or solve problems. We use these skills towards making us comfortable based on what we have trained our rational minds to believe is good for us. But our rational mind is based on thoughts and using it we cannot see beyond its/our mental constructs and the physical external world.
To get our focus off the physical world we must first want to. Doing this requires us to realize that putting our attention on our physical existence, thoughts and emotions does not make us happier. Doing this starts us off on the path of shift away from an almost solely external focus to one that includes the mysterious world within.
The benefits of reducing our focus on our busy lives, noisy world and "me" focus cannot be overstated. There are lots of ways to address the "me" focus such as by being more giving, loving and compassionate and feeling empathy for others and even ourselves. Others are being less judgmental, genuinely more forgiving and accepting, aiding and assisting others as they need to be helped. Dealing with our busy lives and the noisy world active world we live in is achieved by practicing mindfulness and meditation and engaging in activities that take us away from the noise world we live in, which or reduce our reliance on our thinking "rational mind".
Of the methods mentioned it is meditation and mindfulness that stand out. These two by themselves are not going to solve our issues or give us the answers on how to finding happiness and more balance in life. What they are is the best way to attain them. In order to find happiness we must reconnect with ourselves, to find that place that we knew as children. The skills we need to begin using, the non-rational (thinking) aspect of our awareness, will not be found by doing what we have been doing. If this were the case we would have found them already.
Practicing meditation and mindfulness help us develop skills most do not normally have conscious access to. To develop them we have to work on stilling our relentless thinking mind by turning our attention within from without. The skills I am referring to are those such as intuition, empathy, telepathy, sensitivity to energy and being more balanced, objective and present in the now.
These skills may not seem like skills; however, they are. We develop them by a combination of working on our mind and by learning to be more consciously aware without using it, something few are aware is even possible. People tend to always be thinking and doing out of habit. They are needed to function in the world but inhibit our awareness of and ability to access what I refer to as our non-rational awareness (a term we will explore in more detail in a later essay in this section).
We do not acquire these skills by thinking about them, we acquire them by not thinking about them. There is no way to "think or do" our way to becoming intuitive, empathic or telepathic... quite the opposite. The same thing applies to becoming more sensitive to and aware of energy energy or to be in the now. It is these skills that will open us up to aspects of our awareness that we need in order to find more balance and peace in our lives, to become whole people versus people living in one corner of one room of the immense mansion that is our consciousness.
Most of the writings on this site are focused on ideas about our minds and our consciousness that can help people find themselves amid the noise of our everyday lives. Without them we become somewhat robotic, merely acting out what we have learned such that we rarely stepping outside the apparent comfort and trap of our illusions about ourselves and our reality. If we seek to be more balanced, happier, to become more intuitive and freed from the emotional traps that tend to dominate our lives we start by accepting that our view of the world has skewed our thinking and allowed an illusion to take firm hold. The illusion I am referring to is the one the mental though constructs of our mind creates.
We can only solve the seekers equation by expanding our awareness beyond the confines of minds. If this is your goal I urge you to step outside your comfort zone, to look within. We get beyond it by working to let go of the never ending stream of thoughts that dominate our consciousness.
Our inner self is immensely powerful, but without exploring and getting to know it we remain trapped by an outer self dominated and controlled by our thoughts and emotions. Only through opening up from within and allowing our light to shine out, which allows us to feel the connections we have with all of creation, can we break free of the issues that plague us. The purpose of the essays and exercises on this site is to share ideas and techniques that can be used to to do this, but doing so is a choice, one that each must make for themselves.
© 2011 Allan Beveridge
Last updated January 12, 2021