For the seasoned treading traveller, the spiritual "tread mill" is often looked at with humor and irony, if not much frustration.
We may have concluded at an intellectual level, or perhaps through occasional deep insights or glimpses, that “it is vain to seek there and far away what - always and already - is here and near, being effortlessly all what we seek”.
But... as soon as "we" let go of the search and come to rest for a while or more, a thought comes back that hopefully one day in the future: “Bingo, "I" shall get it!” And here we are back, happily or miserably, to the spiritual tread mill, feeling in bondage of this illusory separate self.
“Hope springs eternal”, whereas all this search is a completely and utterly hopeless case. So now, forget hope!
It sounds like a paradox. There is nothing to do as there is no one to do anything in the first place. Yet a plan that could prove fruitful is“Work hard!”, tells us Bart Marshall, in the documentary “Closer than close”.
Here the words “Work hard” practically mean a very specific type of doing, that is stopping altogether entertaining the sense of separation.
You were never separate because there was no one to be separated in the first place, except in imagination, created again and again, entertained...
"Why are we unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn't one". - Wei Wu Wei.