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.  It's resting with curiosity, that's the invitation.  And of course either one, either resting or curiosity can actually instead be put to use to avoid your experience.  It's really clever how we figured that out.  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, these ideas, beliefs and fantasies about life that once again, your curiosity takes you right out of your present moment experience.  I mean that sincerely when I say how clever of us, what a wonderful thing to have discovered.  The word is out.

Again, it's not better to be curious about the now, it's not according to some judgment here.  It's just a pointing to another possibility of resting 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, spiritual forms of resting, spiritual forms of curiosity like meditation and inquiry, all of the wonderful forms of spiritual practice.  Everything from Ramana's self inquiry, "Who am I?", to the Sedona Method, and Byron Katie's, "Is it true?" to any sincere heart-felt question about experience.

That's the core of any spiritual method.  That's the essence of spiritual techniques.  They're all wonderful, they're all useful.  The art, or you could maybe extend that a little bit and call it "the heart" of spiritual techniques is 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 that devotion, that focus, that curiosity and that 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. If you can also find what is already resting in that, find what is already intensely curious about your experience just the way it is.  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, right here with the sensations that are present right in this moment.

It's not that it's better or that it's wrong to be curious about something else.  And yet, there is also this invitation to find out what happens if you spend all your awareness on your experience just the way it is, on what is happening right now.