Stay In Your Deck Chair

The Final Destination Is Where You Already Are

At Mandali, 4 September 2025 – photo: Rupert Spira

In this contemplation, you are invited to explore what lies beneath the restless thoughts that drift into past and future. What seems at first like boredom, expectation or longing is often the very doorway to the peace you seek. By staying close to your immediate experience and sinking below the surface movements of the mind, you may discover a depth in yourself that needs nothing and is already fulfilled.

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Only a separate self would have the desire to become enlightened, and there is no such self. Notice any residual impulse to do something, to find something, to understand something, to achieve or acquire something. Notice even the impulse to meditate. What could meditation add to your being, and what could any experience take from your being?

Be especially aware of any lingering desire to become enlightened or awakened. Such a desire belongs only to the illusory separate self. Let this impulse be seen for what it is, a subtle movement away from the simplicity of being.

Do not be like the person who arrives at their deck chair on the Caribbean beach but is so restless they keep taking trips into town. Stay in your deck chair. That is the final destination. As Meister Eckhart said, ‘When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there you must stay.’¹

Being Has No Purpose

The mind may ask, ‘What is the purpose of this self-resting?’ Yet to follow that question is simply to continue the search in a subtler form. What could being gain from being? There is no other self or being, apart from the one infinite being that you are, to benefit from simply being.

In time, the mind is gradually relieved of its sorrow and agitation and progressively permeated by the imperturbable peace and causeless joy that are the nature of being. The body is eased of its restlessness and tension, your activities are freed from stress, and your relationships from conflict. Yet these are side effects, not the purpose of simply being.

Can you, without a purpose, simply be?

Sinking Through the Layers

If you find yourself venturing into the past or future through thinking, it is almost always because an uncomfortable feeling lies beneath the thinking, and thought provides a means of escape. Escaping boredom, expectation, longing or seeking through thought does nothing to diminish the feeling itself. It merely avoids it. When you return from your excursion into thinking, the feeling will still be there.

The peace you long for is not found by escaping uncomfortable feelings through thought. It lies in the opposite direction. It lives in your being, just beneath your feelings.

If you find yourself lost in thought, trace the thought back to the uncomfortable feeling that underlies it, the feeling from which you are trying to escape. Then sink deeply into that feeling. Sink into the boredom itself and, at some point, you will pass through it and discover the peace at its depths.

If your thoughts are like ripples and waves on the surface of the ocean, your feelings are like currents and eddies in its middle layers, and the peace of your being is like the silent depths. So if you find yourself resting on the surface, surfing the waves of thought, sink down into the feelings that underlie them, and then sink further into the quiet depths of your being.

The Nature of Longing

Be sensitive to the slightest feeling of longing, even if it has no particular object. It may simply be an existential sense that something or someone is missing. What you long for lives just beneath that feeling. Longing itself is never fulfilled; it only subsides.

Each time a desire is fulfilled through the acquisition of an object, substance, activity or relationship, the impulse of seeking does indeed come to an end. As this impulse subsides, you taste the peace that is the nature of being. But the mind soon rises again and attributes this peace to the object or experience that preceded it, initiating yet another cycle of seeking.

We spend our lives oscillating between seeking and temporary fulfilment, but we never find lasting peace or happiness until we finally grow tired of this cycle. At some point, perhaps spontaneously or with the help of a friend or a book, we notice that the peace experienced whenever a desire is fulfilled is always the same peace and always within us. It is never added from the outside.

We come to understand that peace and quiet joy are the nature of our being and are only covered over by seeking and longing. As this understanding dawns, a spontaneous reorientation takes place. We do not stop engaging in activities and relationships, but we stop seeking fulfilment in them. We seek fulfilment where it truly lies, in our being.

Having found this fulfilment within, we return to the world and express it, share it, celebrate it and communicate it in our activities and relationships.

1. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), German Dominican mystic. From his teachings on mystical union with the divine, widely cited in modern translations of his sermons and writings.

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