The Kingdom of Heaven
“And his disciples said to him, ‘On what day will the kingdom come?’ And Jesus replied: ‘It will not come while people watch for it; they will not say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘Look, there it is!’, but the Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it.’” ~ Gospel of Thomas
‘The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it.’ The reason people don’t see it is because they are looking for it. Their attention is focussed on the future, and so they miss the gift of this moment. They are so caught up in the game of asking-questions-and-waiting-for-answers, so busy trying to be a ’somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’, that they miss the astonishing intimacy that is already here, an intimacy that simply burns up all questions and answers, leaving only the wonder of what is.
The mind just loves to ask questions, because as long as it is asking questions, its continuity is assured: there is a sense of past, future, individuality. There is a person who has questions, and who will eventually find the answers. There is a seeker who, one day, will come to rest. Curious how it’s always ‘one day’…
Do you not think that if there were answers to find, you would have found them by now? Have you not already been given enough answers? Are your bookshelves not full of answers, overflowing with them?
You see, the questioning must continue, because thought must continue. It doesn’t want to give up, it doesn’t want to die. Answers to your questions have been given over and over again, but the mind cannot accept these as the real answers. If it did so, not only would the questions be annihilated, but also the one who asks them. The questioner arises and dissolves with the questions. They depend on each other. Ultimately, they are each other. If the questions go, so does the questioner.
What is the questioner but a bundle of conditioning, a mass of assumptions, collected over the years? The one who asks the questions, and waits for answers, is actually made of the answers that he has collected! So to let go of this knowledge, to let go of the questions and answers, would be to let go of his very self. No wonder we don’t want to stop seeking. The end of seeking is the death of the questioner, the death of the seeker!
It’s inevitable that the mind must continue to ask questions and wait for answers, for its very existence is at stake! So the great search goes on: “One day I will be liberated! One day I will be free!”
Why not today? Why not now? If not now, when?
What answers are you waiting for? What questions are you asking? For how much longer will you seek the Kingdom?
Perhaps eventually the futility of the seeking will be seen through, and then maybe you will burst out laughing when you see the ridiculous knots that you have tied yourself up in, trying to be free, trying to be liberated. Yes, there’s plenty of laughter when the dream of individuality and the struggle to be free from it all is seen through — indeed, there’s very little to be serious about then!
‘The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the earth, and yet people do not see it.’ Even that — even our ignorance of the Kingdom, even our search for the Kingdom — even that is part of the Kingdom.
There’s nothing that the Kingdom is not. It embraces everything. Everything.
~ From: The Wonder of Being: Awakening to an Intimacy Beyond Words, by Jeff Foster
