It is because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness.
from The Quest, Volume Two,
The Notebooks of Paul Brunton
William Butler Yeats, arguably one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, went to great lengths to visit spirit mediums, automatic writers and mystics of any reputation, and studied the works of Swedenborg and William Blake, as well as many others so-called mystics, all in the attempt to find evidence of the hidden reality he could feel but never could touch.
Bill Wilson and the other original founders of Alcoholics Anonymous attended numerous seances in the early days of their organization, trying to contact spirits for guidance and access to something the physical world. In their book Alcoholics Anonymous, they quote from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, the pages of which are full of people seeking an experience of the spirit.
I know several people who have travelled to South America to take ayahuasca for the same purpose.
As Paul Brunton says above, we seek these experiences because we are meant to experience our oneness with all things and all people. From the place of spirit, this is our natural state. Oneness. Connectedness. As individuality, we feel ourselves as separate from everything; and this idea of separation is supported by society, politics, religion, advertising and our educational system. All tell us, in various ways and for various reasons, that we are separate and alone, we always will be separate and alone, and life is suffering. From this perspective our souls cry out, insisting that we find something beyond this separation and suffering. Something deeper.
Meditation gives us the tool to drop out of the relative world and into the Absolute. All of the gyres and spirits and faeries of Yeats, the hallucinations of the ayahuasca, all of these are just stops on the way to the Absolute - expressions and experiences, both real and imagined, of levels between here and there. In all of his desperate seeking, all Yeats wanted was to be able to feel at home within himself, to feel the truth of Being that he sensed deep within but could not find connection with. What he wanted was the experience we are able to give ourselves twice each day in meditation.
This experience is absolutely free for the taking, available always, requiring no travel, no danger, no advanced knowledge, no genius for poetry, no herbal ingestion. Requiring only our decision to sit quietly, eyes closed, with our mantra, and simply take it as it comes.
Today I will meditate, morning and evening, and in between meditations, I will ask of the universe for a sign, something meant just for me, that I may be absolutely sure I am living and moving in the right direction.
