God was Seeking Me

Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk of the first half of this century, says in his autobiography, The Golden String, "I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me." Have you noticed that you are always seeking? Everything you do is a form of seeking. What is it that you are seeking...truly? I would suggest that, first and foremost that you are seeking comfort, security and pleasure. And, what could that be but a personal agenda? That seeking for comfort, security and pleasure will always fail. It will temporarily succeed....for a moment...but sooner or later it all falls down. Pleasure is always fleeting. The higher the pleasure, the faster it passes. At a deeper level we are seeking some way to stabilize this idea of self. We are seeking to authenticize and identify this individual, separate, special entity. We even use our "spiritual path" in order to become a "spiritual person." That is an oxymoron of cosmic proportions. There is no such thing as a spiritual person. Those two things are the opposite of one another. The word "person" or "personality" comes from an Etruscan phrase, per sona, "through sound." It referred to the mask that the players wore in the dramas which had a megaphone built in. Your persona is your mask that hides your real self and yet you are always trying to glorify and stabilize the persona, the image, the mask. We don't want to come to the place where we have to say "I don't know." Oh, we can sit around in study groups and say it, but I'm not talking about the concept of "I don't know." I'm talking about the realization, the total disorientation, the complete amnesia that comes with realizing that I really don't know who, what or where I am. Whoa!

Griffiths, who had sought through religion and philosophy, was educated at Oxford, had gone into the priesthood and then the monastery, finally realized that he had no way to conceive of God, "Was He truly a Person, as Christian writers maintained, or might He not be conceived impersonally, like Brahman, or again might not the absolute reality be simply a state, like the Nirvana of the Buddha?
"Thus my mind was gradually reduced to chaos. All the elements of religion which had been building up into a living structure in my soul, and had seemed to meet in the harmony of a living temple, of which Christ was the corner-stone and the principle of unity, now fell apart, and I was lost in confusion. At last I decided that I must make a new start."

That was the undoing. We can't build a structure out of God. There is no way to structure It and yet the mind, the small "m" mind, the ego-mind, the no-mind (because it is not a mind at all; it doesn't think; it just keeps repeating the same idea over and over in an infinite variety of forms) always wants to contain God within a structure because structures protect the ego. And I'm not just talking about physical structures, I'm talking about psychological structures as well - all kinds of definitions and paradigms that we hold about who we are and how we should be...they are all false. So, Griffiths goes on to say, "I saw that it was not I who was seeking God...." We must begin to see that we are not truly seeking God, we are seeking to avoid God, even when we claim to be seeking God. We are not seeking Reality; we are seeking an idea of God that we are holding and that's just not what God is.

"I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me."