The unmaking of the Seeker and the fall the Hero

For millennias one of the most persistent images of the spiritual search has been that of a human  leaving the world and the worldly affairs. The yogi goes into the forest, the monk enters the monastery, the sadhu disappears into the mountains, the hermit finds a cave. The movement is one of subtraction: fewer possessions, fewer relationships, fewer distractions, fewer comforts, until eventually there is almost nothing left between consciousness and itself. There is tapasya, there is sadhana, there is discipline, repetition, silence, sometimes extreme austerity. Somewhere inside this ancient imagination is the belief that if we remove enough of the noise of oordinary life something essential might finally become visible.Meeting God or ourselves,  realiz8ng or true nature and gathering some super powers in between all the process.

Modernity has invented an almost perfectly opposite mythology. Today, when someone says they want to “find themselves,” we rarely imagine them sitting in a cave and practicingausterity. We imagine a plane ticket. Leave your job, leave your city, travel alone, cross borders, meet strangers, fall in love with someone whose language you barely understand, miss trains, sleep in unfamiliar places, eat things you cannot identify or digest J, let the world disturb you. Instead of reducing experience, we multiply it. Instead of disappearing from the world, we throw ourselves into it, and somehow we expect the same result: self-knowledge.

I find this opposition fascinating because perhaps these two movements are not opposites at all. They are both Ruptures. The ascetic produces rupture through Subtraction(I’m out of here); the traveler produces rupture through displacement ( I m’ out there) .Both interrupt the structures that ordinarily maintain identity, continuity, repetition and attachment. At home, we are held together by an extraordinary network of repetition: our language, profession, family, friends, possessions, habits, reputation, the café where somebody already knows what we order. Other people participate in maintaining our identity because they remember who we were yesterday. Remove that architecture, whether by sitting alone in a cave or arriving somewhere nobody knows your name, and the continuity of the person you believe yourself to be begins to loosen.

But there is another form of rupture that interests me even more: The relationship. Krishnamurti repeatedly returned to the idea that relationship is a mirror in which we can observe ourselves. Not only romantic relationship, but our relationship with another human being, with society, possession, fear, ambition, authority, desire. Alone, I can construct a remarkably flattering philosophy about who I am. Put another human being in front of me and suddenly there is jealousy, attachment, expectation, comparison, tenderness, control, fear, generosity, irritation. Another person has the inconvenient habit of refusing to remain inside my philosophy or mindset.

In this sense, travel becomes an extraordinary multiplication of mirrors. Someone welcomes you into their home; somebody else cheats you. Someone desires you; someone barely notices you. You judge customs you do not understand and discover assumptions you did not know you had. You romanticize a culture and then have to live inside its contradictions, and see the beauty and the grotesque of it. You become brave in one situation and ridiculously frightened in another. The cave removes the familiar mirrors, while relationship confronts us with one, and travel surrounds us with hundreds of unfamiliar ones. Yet none of these circumstances guarantees anything. A person can spend ten years in a cave and become magnificently attached to the identity of being a person who has spent ten years in a cave. Another can cross fifty countries without ever leaving the psychological territory they departed with.In same case scenario there is a Shadow that travels wihin that will not be silenced.

This is where the whole idea of the seeker begins to trouble me.

There is something almost mad in the mechanism of spiritual seeking. The mind creates an image of enlightenment and then begins searching for the image it has created. It imagines a future condition called freedom, awakening, healing, the higher self, God, and simultaneously invents the future person who will someday attain it. There is who I am now, apparently Insufficient, and there is who I will become once I have practiced enough, understood enough, suffered enough, traveled enough. Between these two imaginary people we construct an entire road and call it a spiritual path.

The destination can change endlessly without disturbing the mechanism. Perhaps I need India, Nepal, Bhutan or some ayahuasca retreat in Peru.Perhaps I need a guru, another initiation, ten years of tapasya, a retreat, a relationship, solitude, another teacher,Bali, caco ceremony, sound healing, another country, another practice. The scenery changes while the fundamental structure survives: there is somebody in here who believes she is going somewhere.”Eat , pray, love” with a backpack on and a e-sim.

We have even created an entire visual language around this idea. Enlightenment has scenery. It has Himalayan mountains and ochre robes, incense, temples, closed eyes, bare feet, solitary roads and beautiful people meditating at sunrise. Travel has developed its own parallel mythology: the backpack, the unknown road, the woman staring through a train window, the distant landscape promising another self on the other side of it. We have become extraordinarily talented at producing images of liberation, but reality itself has no aesthetic. The more beautiful it is, the more scary it becomes for the soul. Because if it is not yours ,it will never fit your shoes and it will start to pain on the road.

Awareness has no costume. Reality has no f…g mood board.

The cave, therefore, can become as much of a bubble as Instagram. The ashram can become a bubble, the journey can become a bubble, solitude can become a bubble. Even renunciation can become a carefully protected environment in which the identity of the seeker is never seriously threatened. And the strange brilliance of the seeker is that failure does not destroy it; failure feeds it. If I do not find what I am searching for here, then perhaps it is there. If this teacher does not deliver me, another one will. If this practice has not transformed me, perhaps I need a more advanced practice. The seeker can survive indefinitely because every disappointment creates another destination.

This is why the statement that the seeker is the obstacle is not merely a beautiful spiritual paradox. There is something mechanically true about it. The seeker exists because of distance: the distance between who I believe I am and who I believe I should become, between here and there, between this moment and some imagined future state called enlightenment. If the distance disappears, the seeker has nothing left to do.It dies.

For a long time we have imagined the spiritual journey as the journey toward something. I am increasingly interested in the opposite possibility: the real journey might be the one that exhausts the need to arrive.

And perhaps this is why I no longer feel particularly interested in calling myself a seeker. I am a liver. English has unfortunately already assigned that word to an organ, but I mean it literally: one who lives. There is an enormous difference between these two orientations. The seeker continually asks experience what it means, what it is teaching, where it is leading, how it contributes to transformation. The liv-er, lives it. Not every relationship needs to become a lesson, not every wound needs to become wisdom, not every country needs to reveal another layer of the self, and not every beautiful afternoon needs to teach us something about consciousness or presence. Sometimes we get on the wrong bus. Sometimes we fall in love. Sometimes somebody disappoints us to the core. Sometimes we eat something extraordinary, sit under a tree, laugh until our stomach hurts, and nothing needs to be extracted from the experience. Life does not have to justify itself by becoming personal development, a narrative or an inspiration quote.

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But killing the seeker may not be enough, because hiding behind the seeker is another character who is even more seductive: the Hero.

The Hero needs a narrative, a buildungs..as the German writers would say.There must be departure, ordeal, suffering, initiation, transformation and return. Ulises. Alexander the Great, Cesar, Forrest Gump, Deadpool  ;)The dramatic scenography : We do not simply suffer; we survive something. We do not simply travel; we undertake a journey. We do not simply change; we become the person who has been transformed. The story continually returns to its protagonist: look where I went, look what happened to me, look what I survived, look what I understood, look who I became. Even suffering acquires a strange value because it demonstrates the magnitude of the person who survived it.

The spiritual hero is particularly fascinating because ego can masquerade beautifully as transcendence. We abandon an ordinary identity and acquire an extraordinary one: the ascetic, the initiated one, the wanderer, the wounded one, the healed one, the woman who went alone, the man who understood. We may even become the person who has transcended ego, which is possibly one of the most sophisticated identities ego has ever invented.

There is nothing inherently wrong with storytelling. Human beings seem almost incapable of living without narrative; we select events, create beginnings and endings, establish causality, identify turning points, transform accidents into fate. But there is something worth observing in our attachment to being the protagonist of everything we encounter. The cave becomes scenery for my transformation, the road becomes scenery, India becomes scenery, love becomes plot, suffering and betrayal becomes plot, healing becomes plot, and eventually even enlightenment becomes the final act of the drama. There is something almost violent about requiring life to continually provide us with character development.

What happens if we stop demanding to be extraordinary?

Perhaps what remains is embarrassingly simple. You wake up and water the plants. You make food. You take care of your body and the place where you live. You respect the people you love. You call your family. You keep your word. You repair something when you have damaged it. You earn enough to sustain your life. You enjoy an afternoon without asking what it is teaching you. You build something slowly, rock by rock, without needing it to become a monument to the person building it.

We have made transformation spectacular because rupture photographs beautifully. Leaving everything, shaving your head, crossing India, disappearing into an ashram, ending the relationship and beginning another life all have tremendous narrative power. There is another kind of transformation that barely produces an image: the slow transformation that comes from what we repeatedly take care of.

This also changes what discipline can mean. Discipline does not necessarily require extreme austerity. There is discipline in being decent every day, in tending something for years, in respecting another person's boundaries, in keeping a promise after the emotion that produced the promise has disappeared, in taking care of the body, in maintaining a home, in remaining available to ordinary life. There is nothing particularly heroic about these things, which may be precisely why the hero finds them so uninteresting.

And this is where values become essential, because “living in the moment” can otherwise become another spiritual justification for impulsivity. Presence does not mean that nothing matters because there is only now. Quite the opposite: if this moment is actually the only place where life occurs, then how I behave inside it matters enormously and I take fully responsibility of my actions. How I speak to another person matters. What I destroy and what I protect matters. What I repeatedly choose matters. Groundedness is not a lesser form of spirituality. It may simply be what remains when spirituality stops being a performance, a circus act to place us on the stage of life under the spotlight. Remember who is the Master Puppeteer.

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Perhaps the deepest correction to the hero is humility, and humility begins with a fact so obvious that we spend most of our lives ignoring it: none of this belongs to us.

We arrive inside a body we did not design, with a heart already beating. We enter a world that has been unfolding for an incomprehensible amount of time without requiring our presence. Trees were growing before us. Rivers were moving. People were loving, fighting, cooking, giving birth, dying and singing. Languages existed before we opened our mouths. Mountains existed before anybody gave them names. And then, for a ridiculously brief period, we are allowed to participate into this magnificent work of art.

Yet almost immediately we behave like owners. My body, my partner, my family, my house, my journey, my purpose, my awakening, my life. Even the people we love become entangled in the language of possession, although perhaps one of the most difficult forms of humility is accepting that another human being never belongs to us. We encounter one another for an unknown amount of time. We walk beside each other, irritate each other, touch each other, care for each other, occasionally break each other's hearts, and eventually lose each other.

We are not owners of one another. We are guests in each other’s lives.

Perhaps we are guests in our bodies too, and guests of existence itself.

Seen from there, gratitude becomes something very different from the sanitized wellness exercise it has become. It is not writing five things in a notebook because somebody told us gratitude will increase our happiness. Gratitude becomes almost unavoidable once possession gives way to impermanence, to change. A body matters because it will not remain. A relationship matters because it cannot be possessed. An afternoon matters because it cannot be kept. The person sitting across from us matters because neither of us knows how much time is actually available except that we share this precious gorgeous infinite Now ; Without Becoming someone or something .

The hero asks life to become significant enough for his story. Humility begins when we understand that life was already significant before we arrived.We don’t need to validate ourselves in order to belong ✨️

And then the ordinary things recover their weight. Watering a plant, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, touching someone we love, keeping our word, sitting quietly, being kind when nobody will ever know we were kind — none of these things need to be elevated into secret enlightenment practices. That would immediately rebuild the spiritual bubble. We do not have to turn washing the dishes into a path toward awakening. We can wash them because they are dirty. We can water the plant because it is thirsty. We can love someone because they are here and because is so beautiful to give and to receive love.

The journey does not have to end. We can travel, practice, meditate, cross oceans, disappear into mountains, meet teachers, fall in love, lose ourselves, change our minds and begin again. The problem was never the road or the cave. The problem begins when everything we touch must become evidence for the magnificent story of who we are becoming.

I don’t want life to be a pilgrimage toward myself. I want to participate in it while I am here, to take care of what has temporarily been placed in my hands, to behave according to values that matter to me, to remain curious without turning curiosity into another search for completion. I want to be less interested in becoming extraordinary and more capable of being fully involved in what is already here.

I am not a seeker. I am a liv-er, a temporary guest in a temporary body, surrounded by other temporary guests. And perhaps gratitude begins precisely there: not because existence has fulfilled some promise to us, but because none of this was ever ours, none of it was guaranteed, and somehow, for this brief moment, we are Here .