The psychology of spiritual seeking

Sometimes spiritual seeking comes from the same place as all our other seekings come. In other words, there can still be this sense that “I need to have a certain experience in order to be okay.” Then, spirituality itself becomes another striving, another attempt to fill some emptiness or deficiency.

When despite your many attempt, you don’t attain it, you will just become more and more resentful. “Why can’t I be enlightened?” Then we get may get bitter and disappointed because underneath it all, there is still the belief that something had to happen to me before I could finally be okay.

Sometimes that is the psychology of spiritual seeking. The search itself can be driven by woundedness, by loss, by a deficient sense of self. Then even spiritual experiences become something we chase. People have these beautiful experiences, joyful, expansive, magnificent, or maybe very simple in a beautiful way, and then they return to their lives and they don’t know how to integrate what happened. Then they spend their lives trying to have the experience again and again.

So there has to be a kind of openness and curiosity, and, also an awareness of the drivenness. Because that drivenness itself can get in the way of precisely what you are seeking for. It’s almost like seeking without seeking. Or needing without needing.

In response to how to become whole, spiritual teachers would say you don’t become whole, you already are whole. You’re just not aware of it. So it’s really the awareness of wholeness that we are looking for. - Gabor Maté