Your me-search needs a deadline.

Research has an end goal; to return.

Etymologically, research means to find again. It is a circular thing, it’s not about finding new things out of thin air, nothing comes nothing. It’s pursuing lost knowledge so to speak. At its deepest root is the idea of circus (the circle, “to go around”). And oddly enough, it instantly makes me jump to the etymology of the word religion, “religare”, meaning to tie-back. To tie-back the source, the origin of our being. And that’s why people confuse research with me-search. Because that me-search really is a return to ourselves.

Biblical + Campbellian? Combos give extra bonus points.

But why start here? Why start at the root?

Because not everything you’re doing is wrong. You do need research to arrive. I know I did, I still do, but I’ve changed my relationship to research once I understood the deceptions I speak about below. Feel free to skip down now–

You need rebirth / resurrection in order to find congruence in your life. But to get there, you must go through incubation / burial first. That is what the process of research is; an incubation that implies an end, a new threshold reached, a brand new state of existence.

So Research is about returning to ourselves, it has a purpose. But we delay that process endlessly, because we cannot let go,. Why am I in a loop, a merry go round, of staying in research mode for so long? Here it is;

Anticipation = dopamine.

Escaping freedom.

Denying death.

Let’s tackle each in turn, below.

Self-Deception #1 … me-search is arousing.

Anticipation is where all the dopamine is. Me-searching takes effort, you anticipate a reward, you have to wait for it to arrive so there’s anticipation, and that creates arousal, you’re focused… but you’re still looping because you’re not really focused are you?

Researching endlessly is a pleasant activity. But it’s not action. I will get to the desert, eventually, but I’m happy to delay it because it feels good. And we get rewarded for putting effort over time in meaningful pursuits. We could already sense the answers arising from the research, it’s been a while in fact, it’s been one book too many for a month or two, and yet we buy the next one.

You know the answer, you delay action.

The problem is that we could lose this flow of dopamine if we stop researching and get on with it. And we don’t know what’s on the other side or if there will be anything there. So we delay.

We delay our own rebirth because the process itself is arousing–even if we are suffering through it (more on that in #2).

At the core of this delay resides tremendous pleasure in dopamine. And I want to make a comparison now to drive this point further into the material; women who are happily pregnant may be happy specifically because of the anticipatory nature of birthing; maybe that’s what’s so exciting. Maybe that’s what makes a pregnant woman shine (biology aside for a second).

The difference however between pregnancy and your endless research is that the end goal is clear; a baby will be born. There’s a clear deadline in 9-months, there’s an incubation phase, and it’s a useful process that culminates in the birth of a baby.

You just haven’t put words on your brain-baby, so to speak.

There’s no deadline. It’s all vague. You’re afraid of putting words answers because of you’re addicted to the anticipation of doing so. You are a child; you are just simulating arousal, that feeling of being “surprised”, over and over again.

Realise you’re cheating yourself from actual happiness, not the pleasure of dopamine, but the wholehearted happiness of giving, of giving birth (symbolically). Yes. You will lose that steady inflow of dopamine once it ends. But your gifting is greater in scope than simple pleasure.

No shame in starting now.

Self-Deception #2 … Escaping freedom.

You have no desire for real freedom. It frightens you at your core, you think of freedom is this distant way as something rather poetic, as somewhat of a goal in life, but never as something real, as something you would pursue seriously. If I gave you freedom today, you would be lost. You would have no idea what to do with yourself. How do I know? Answer me this. Can you be alone with yourself in meditation for even half an hour, without seeking total escape from the abyss that begins to show itself to you? That abyss is your deepest of voice, and you spend you waking days avoid it, escaping its freedom.

You have a masochistic relationship to freedom.

You are a willing victim to serfdom because it makes you feel safe deep down.

You know it’s all wrong; and that’s when you feel anxious, depressed, un-centered.

Because if you stay a slave, then you wouldn’t have to stick your head out from the mass. You wouldn’t have to risk standing out and being attacked by the other insecure people around you who are looking for the other to be the hero, someone other than themselves.

But you are the Hero. The lost king/queen who must return, kill the usurpers, and take back the kingdom.

And everyone knows that deep down.

But they do no act.

They don’t because they do not want to “impose”. They are like a child, well-learned in the art of smoothing out the edges in order not to freak out Mommy or Daddy. You are not a child anymore once you remember (through research i.e. returning) your ability to impose your will on the world like a kid does, like a Hero does.

But a hero always dies.

And that’s the third deception holding you back from true action; your denial of Death.

Self-Deception #3 … denial of Death.

You may be suffering through this entire research, me-search process. The burial is rather harsh. You really loved that life you had, that illusion was really the best imaginable illusion you could have lived. And you’re right. It was. It was given your current values, and worldview. And it’s dying. And with death, comes tremendous amounts of unknowns, of resistance; that’s the “unconscious” speaking. But it’s not our voice. It’s not the eternal voice in our heart speaking, that is blocked when death enters the scene. And it’s blocked because you have misunderstand death.

You deny the role that death plays IN life. Not at the end, but during it. You remember it’s role only when you have a near death experience, or when a close person to you dies. But otherwise you are desensitised to it. You are disconnected from the entire thing. You forgot that the meat and the vegetables you consume were once living breathing beings, and that their death gives you life. You live off of death by eating. The source of life is death. And that’s why we ritualise eating with prayer, to honour the role that death has in the sacrifices it makes for the living.

Become familiar with death and you will stop to deny its existence in your life. You cannot move forward if you continue to fail at this step. You hide from it, you ignore it, you insult death. But in that process, you end up the victim when it comes, and it will–soon. Death is not your enemy. Stop believing that death is bad, you are mistaking its role as punishment are loss when it is in fact a deliverance to live freely.