Curious About What Is

(An edited transcript of the mp3 on the Listen to Satsang page)

Satsang is an invitation to be curious. It's an invitation to rest but to rest with your eyes open, to give away this awareness, to spread it around, to look around. The invitation is to rest with curiosity. But of course either resting or curiosity can actually instead be put to use to avoid your experience. We can rest to avoid things. You can just rest, rest your way right out of awareness and go to sleep.

And then you can be really curious, and get so curious about how things should be and what could happen, the ideas, beliefs and fantasies that you have about life that once again, your curiosity takes you right out of your present moment experience. How clever of us to have discovered how to leave the present moment!

It's not better to be curious about the now, it's just another possibility to rest just where you are. And the same thing is true with curiosity. The possibility is to be really curious, but about the way things already are. There's all kinds of spiritual techniques. You could call them the science of resting and the science of curiosity, or the spiritual form of resting, spiritual form of curiosity. Examples of spiritual resting and curiosity are meditation and inquiry, and all of the other wonderful forms of spiritual practice, including everything from self inquiry to any sincere heart-felt question about experience.

The art of spiritual techniques is in applying them to the present moment. It can seem like a waste of time to focus on what's already here. But you can give your devotion, your focus, your curiosity and your allowing resting acceptance to what's already present right now. The place where all of this comes alive is in the experience you are having right now. There is no seeking required, no searching, no movement or journey to something else that's required first. Seeking is a good way to delay being curious, delay resting, when you can do it right now; just rest with and be curious about the sensations that are present right in this moment.

It's not that it's wrong to be curious about something else than your present moment experience. But you can also find out what happens if you spend all your awareness on your experience just the way it is, on what is happening right now.