From seeking to searching

Two books arrived today, there was no way for me to know beforehand they were brothers, two sides of the same issue. Ah, but should I really bore you with the Dane-Zaa or the specifics of my quest? Enough to relate the process, and no more. That’s key to some of their teachings which focus on the value and power of knowledge. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read, because it resounds in my heart as true. It echoes in my head. It allows me to transend the thoughtcave I’d been trapped in.

My entire life I’ve been seeking answers, whether it be in philosophy, history, psychology or religion. All the time like a drunk librarian trying to find a lost book, not knowing how to tell anyone else what I was looking for, just knowing that I’d know it when I find it. My mother is a librarian, my father a theology scholar, though he never earned much of a living from it. I’m uniquely equipped, and burdened.

I’ve spent so long just trying to find a direction to hunt in. It isn’t easy, plenty of people claim wisdom, but they bring nothing new to the table. Self worship, most of it. I know for a fact I am not worthy of worship, so self worship never worked for me. For some time I thought that to be a sad pilgrim was my destiny; the quest I was on was one to be endured, not completed. I still think that’s part of the truth. That’s what fascinates me about truth, you can get parts of it out, but all of it? It would take a lifetime, it will take a lifetime, and I’ll have to teach someone else, and it’ll take their lifetime too, and on and on until the job is done.

Of course it seems futile, because an individual can only ever work at a small part of the whole. One must at the same time doubt everything, but also doubt themselves, such that any source, any person is credible, is worth listening to, because wisdom is not a domain anyone can own.

This is me trying to condense it, trying to say it in as few words as possible. I think that’s what great thinkers do best; condense vastly complex ideas down to the point of simple statements. I guess I’m still aspiring to be a great thinker, or at least a great story teller.

Something about the obscure, about the least tred paths of human consciousness has drawn me for so long. Today, I feel connected again, I feel purposeful. These feelings are fleeting, but worth seeking out. And now the seasons are changing, I go from seeking amidst the huge mass of humanity to condensing and teasing out meaning from what I am finding. I found a path, and surely this path will lead me to someplace worth following a path to.

There’s something in holding this book, it reminds me of what I was supposed to feel while holding holy scripture. It’s an academic work, but dealing with cultural ideas that Western society has failed to understand. That’s my role, understanding the outsider. It’s all I’m good at. But they don’t exactly put a job listing out for that, now do they?

I think the man who wrote these books was a sincere searcher, a pilgrim like me seeking some deeper understanding. Thus, I think he can help me. Or to be more accurate, I can be helped by him.

I find myself more and more entranced with the silence, with the spaces between where thoughts go undirected. It isn’t the void, but it isn’t quite something either. There, that is where I meditate and try to find the dreaming, the lost art of connecting forgotten mysteries.

and reading what I just wrote, I think to myself that if I said any of this to anyone they’d think me mad, manic or fanatic. No, I have no delusions as to my vision quest producing anything other than an understanding in me. That is enough.

I guess I hope that some other lost pilgrim comes on this, and it gives them hope for a transition from seeking to searching.

The more likely outcome is only my processing. Long road ahead, and I must pace myself.