You have a low-grade sense, most of the time, that something is missing.
You cannot always say what.
If you press on it, you might say it is rest, or love, or meaning, or a different life. If you press harder, the answer changes. None of them feel quite right.
The feeling persists regardless of which answer you give.
This is not because you have not yet found the right thing to put in the missing place.
This is because the missing place was not made by the absence of any specific thing.
The missing place is the sense that there is a place to be filled.
It is the assumption underneath every desire.
Notice when you want something.
There is the thing wanted, and there is the wanting, and underneath both, there is a quiet conviction that you are currently not whole, and that getting the thing will make you whole.
You get the thing.
You are whole for about an hour.
Then the wanting starts up again, attached to a different object.
Most people interpret this pattern as evidence that they have not yet found the right thing.
The pattern is evidence of something else.
The wanting is not produced by the absence of the things wanted. The wanting is produced by the assumption of incompleteness.
The assumption keeps generating new objects for the wanting to attach to.
The assumption is the wound.
The objects are the bandages that fall off.
What if you looked, just for a moment, for the incompleteness itself.
Not what is missing. Not what you want. The actual sense that something is not whole.
Where is it.
You will find restlessness in the body. A faint pull. A sense that here is not quite right and there would be better.
But the incompleteness itself, the missing thing, you cannot find.
You can find the sensation that something is missing. You cannot find the missing thing.
This is because nothing is missing.
The sensation is real. The missing thing it points at is not.
The Ashtavakra Gita does not soften this.
Wonder of wonders! I am pure awareness.
Not on the way to. Not after sufficient practice. Now. Already.
The wonder is not at the rarity of the recognition. The wonder is at how completely the recognition has been hidden by the assumption that it was not yet here.
You have been living for years inside the sentence something is missing.
The sentence is so familiar that you have stopped noticing it is a sentence.
It feels like a fact.
It is not a fact. It is a habit of attention.
The attention keeps scanning for what is missing, and because the scanning is the missing, the scanning never finds what would end it.
Stop scanning.
Not as a technique. As an experiment.
For one minute, do not look for what is missing.
What is here.
Air arriving and leaving the body. The weight of the body where it is resting. The temperature of the skin. Some kind of sound. Some kind of light.
A thought, possibly. Another thought. A pause between thoughts.
In this minute, is anything actually missing.
The mind will rush to answer yes. It will list the bills, the unfinished work, the person you wish was here, the version of your life that has not happened yet.
These are real. They are also not in this minute.
In this minute, there is what is here.
What is here is not incomplete.
It is just what is here.
The completeness is not a feeling you have to generate. It is not a state you arrive at by relaxing enough. It is the simple fact that what is here, is here, and nothing has to be added for it to be here.
The mind hears this and looks for the catch.
There is no catch.
The catch was the sense that there was a catch.
Nisargadatta puts it cleanly. You are not what you take yourself to be.
What you take yourself to be is the one who is missing something. The one who has to get to a different state. The one whose life is in progress toward a destination.
What you actually are is what is reading this sentence.
It is not missing anything.
It cannot be missing anything, because it is what missing would have to appear in.
The missing is a content of awareness.
Awareness itself is full.
You can verify this without belief.
Notice that you are aware right now.
Notice that the awareness has no edge of dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction is appearing in the awareness. The awareness itself is not dissatisfied.
When you take yourself to be the one who is dissatisfied, you spend your life trying to fix the dissatisfaction.
When you notice you are the awareness in which the dissatisfaction is appearing, the fixing project becomes optional.
The dissatisfaction does not disappear immediately.
It just stops being the main thing.
The main thing was always the awareness.
The awareness was never missing anything.
The whole search for the missing thing was happening inside the thing the search assumed it lacked.
You can stand up from this and go back to your day.
The bills are still unpaid. The work is still unfinished. The person is still not here.
None of that has changed.
What has changed is that the sense that you are incomplete is, just barely, no longer the floor you are walking on.
The floor is something else.
The floor was always something else.
You have been walking on it the whole time, while looking for somewhere to stand.
Sources: Ashtavakra Gita, ~5th century BCE. Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, 1973.