Could you comment on the Buddhist saying: “What you find here you will find there”?
Question:
Could you comment on the Buddhist saying: “What you find here you will find there”?
Nukunu:
A great expression! There is only one unchanging reality that appears in millions and millions of forms and names. In Advaita Vedanta they say “All is Brahman” or “All is God”. So God comes dancing as thoughts, feelings and everything else that we are experiencing. Even our psychological dramas are the play of Brahman. The experience of worry, for example, is Brahman and the attempt to solve this worry is also Brahman.
Even the feeling of “me” is Brahman. To know this is tremendously freeing! There is no separate ego or personal “me” because the ego is also Brahman. Jiddu Krishnamurti, the great Indian spiritual teacher, expressed this in such a beautiful way:
“When you see through this, you become THAT.”
We don´t understand “THAT”, we become it! We become the truth – Brahman. So whenever we see through something, whenever we really understand that it is impermanent, we become the truth; this is what Krishnamurti’s saying means. We will find the same essential nature if we look deeply into any experience, and it does not matter if it is a state of mind, a feeling or a perception. All apparent manifestations, feelings and thoughts are one reality. If we go deep in love we will find this reality, but we will also find it if we if we go deep in anger. So whatever we see through helps us to realise the truth.
What do we mean by going deep? We mean seeing through the impermanence of all experiences.
It is like the waves and the ocean; the waves are appearances of the ocean. When two states of mind are fighting, it is like two waves from the ocean fighting each other! Who will win? They are both water! When we are fighting with ourselves that which fights, the fighting and the object for the fight are all Brahman – the truth. When this becomes our realisation there is only freedom because it takes away desires and it is desires that take us away from the here and now.
Don´t focus on the future, just rest into whatever is here now. Then you will realize something so fulfilling, but difficult to explain and name, and you will simultaneously know that every experience is “that”. The drama of desires will settle down because “What you find here, you will find there!”
People ask me again and again what to do about this mad world we are living in. I tell them “First find out who you are! Then look at the world and see what it is”. The “you” that is experiencing the world is not real, so how can “it” know anything true about the world? I totally agree with the great sage Nisargadatta Maharaj’s answer to the question “What to do with all the fighting and killing in the world?” He answered “In my world there is no fighting!”.