You're on a meditation retreat. The teachers describe deep silence. You sit. You sit longer. You try to find the silence. You think you find it for a moment. Then you wonder if you really found it. The wondering is loud. You try to silence the wondering. The trying makes more noise. The pursuit of silence has produced an unusually noisy mind. The harder you pursue, the further the silence retreats.
K named this trap repeatedly. The method designed to produce a state is run by the same fragment the state is supposed to dissolve. The pursuit of silence is noise. The pursuit of freedom is bondage. The pursuit of insight is delusion. The pursuit itself contradicts the target, because the target is the absence of the pursuer.
Every spiritual method has this structure. There's a target state — silence, peace, enlightenment, presence, awareness, love. There's a method to get there. There's a practitioner doing the method. The target state requires the practitioner's absence. The method requires the practitioner's presence. The structure can't deliver. It can produce something — a more refined practitioner, a more calm fragment, a better-behaved center. It can't produce what it promises.
The body of method-chasing is forward-leaning. The chest reaches for the state. The face is mildly furrowed in pursuit. The teeth might be slightly clenched. The body of method-dropped is back-resting. The chest is not leaning anywhere. The face is unmade. The teeth aren't doing anything. The second body is closer to the thing the first body was chasing. The first body could not arrive at the second by trying harder.
Pursuing silence is noise. Pursuing freedom is bondage. The pursuit is the problem. Drop the pursuit and what was being pursued can show up. Or not. Either way, the chasing has ended, which was the actual issue. The chasing was the disease, dressed up as the solution.