On Wednesday night, I walked past the bright lights of the West End, took a right at the Statue of Eros, a left just after Waterstones, and found myself at St James’s Piccadilly.
I was
there to see a talk by teacher, philosopher and modern-day mystic Rupert “The Spiralizer” Spira.
If anyone can make your head spin, it’s Rupert.
Between various musings about the nature of matter, mind, consciousness and
time, The Spiralizer told an intriguing short story:
(paraphrased)
A chap from Cairo wakes up from a vivid dream.
In the dream, he’s been transported to a house in Baghdad. Buried under this house are treasures beyond his wildest imagination.
The dream seems so real and so enticing that the man decides to leave his house in Cairo to travel to Baghdad.
He arrives 6 months later. To his astonishment, he finds the exact house he dreamt of 6 months earlier.
He knocks on the door and a woman answers. The man from Cairo tells her all about his dream.
Amused, the woman recounts her own dream from earlier that night, all about treasures beneath a house in Cairo. She describes the house in so much detail that the man realises it’s his house.
He travels back to his home in Cairo and finds the treasure buried beneath
it.
So what treasure was this man seeking in Baghdad?
To my mind, this treasure represents what everyone longs for:
Happiness, peace, contentment, joy, calm, fulfilment – whatever word fits best for you.
The word doesn’t matter. What matters is where we try to find it.
Places like
bright shiny objects (a new iPhone or car), status & recognition (a fancy job title) or by trying to shake as many green leaves off the magic money tree as possible.
These are all common pit stops on the treasure hunt.
If you’re anything like me, you might’ve even taken out your treasure map, plotted every point which actively claims to hold that treasure, then visited them one by one. Points like personal development books, setting goals, journaling, positive thinking…
The list goes on.
And if, like me, you’ve searched so many nooks & crannies that you’ve exhausted every place to look and you’ve started to wonder if you’ve been sent on an everlasting wild goose chase, this story holds a clue.
Searching itself might be the problem.
Why?
Because you already have what you’re looking for. You could even say you already are what you’re looking for.
The trick, if there is one, is seeing this. This is when we can call off the search.
And, like the fellow from Cairo, end up back home.
T.S. Eliot put
it like this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Wherever you are on your own exploration…
If you’d like to spend a few miles with a
fellow traveller:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
That’s all for today. Have a great weekend.
- Tom