Seeking

Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari said in his intimate conversations with God:

I’m drunk from You freeing me from wine and cup.
I’m Your bird free from grain and being hunted.
What I desire from the Ka’aba and idols is You!
Otherwise, I seek nothing from these two.

Talab [seeking] has as its root T-L-B and is connected to these meanings: seeking, researching, asking something from someone, pursuing, being far away, not being present, claiming, soliciting, desiring, having a liking for or sympathy for something [Maurice Gloton: Une Approche du Coran par la Grammaire et le Lexique; p. 523].

Serge de Laugier de Beaureceuil, the most important connaisseur of the life and teachings of Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari, states in his Chemin de Dieu, p. 249-250 that the intimate conversations of this pir of Herat are the best commentary on this field of seeking:

Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari is severe towards those who don’t want to suffer while seeking. He calls them ungrateful cowards. Those who seek to be recompensed, by e.g. the joys of paradise, are mercenaries. How sublime an effort the search for God may be, it is useless. Those who occupy themselves with seeking, hoping to find God by their own efforts, boast of accomplishing the impossible. Those people are more lucid who are conscious of their own lack of powers in this respect. For most things, it is like this you first seek and then find; regarding Him you find Him and then you start seeking Him.

Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari puts finding [yaft] opposite to understanding [dar yaft]. Understanding gets in the way of inward realization:

آنکه ترا یافت، یافت، اما کجا یافت؟

He has found who has found You! 
But where has he found You, 
so that He may find You,
when no one comprehends Your Essence 
or the meaning of what You do?
It is true that he has found You,
Without understanding You in what he found.
He who searches to understand this,
gets further away from Reality.
Poor seeker and sought!

Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari stated:

آنکه گفت که ترا یافتم، از خود پرست

If you say ‘I have found You!’ then you better free yourself of your ego. 
You are absent, so how can you seek the Present One?
You don’t exist, so how can you seek the Existing One?
The sign of finding is the annihilation of your ego.
Your ambition is to understand and not to find.
Here you are, trying to understand everything,
but you haven’t tasted finding.
You can only find Him by Him.
You seek Him by yourself,
while you don’t know yourself or Him.

هر که ترا یافت، ترا دید

He who has found You, has seen You.
And who has seen You, has disappeared from his own view.  
Because of my ego, I am a veil to myself and I am in torment. 
In vain do I hurry: what can I find as I am nothing?

Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari said in his intimate conversations with God:

O, God! The heavenly flower is a thorn in the mystic’s eye
And those who seek You, what need do they have for heaven?