What is Truth? – Part 4

“Believe those who are seeking the truth.
Doubt those who find it.”

~ Andre Gide

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There’s a reason our pioneering ancestors were called settlers. They settled for what they found. Should we ever stop searching?

Every seeker, whether their desired goal is spiritual enlightenment, success, or happiness, assumes there’s a destination and longs to reach it. But the wise person continues their search, always moving the final goal posts beyond where they’ve reached, so there is always more.

In his classic, The Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse wrote, “For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.”

We may agree and glibly say, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” but that’s a bromide, not an actual value for most people; the destination looms important. Goal-orientation is a symptom of a deeper issue, our anxiety about the unknown. In fact, much of civilized life seems to be devoted to turning unknown into known. We light the night to escape our fear of darkness; we spurn the vicissitudes of sun and wind in favor of splitting atoms to generate our power. (Don’t worry about seasons, just flip a switch). And many mothers can remember the assault of marketing around baby formula, insisting it was better for infants. Why? Because nutrients could be measured. Known vs unknown.

In her book, The Journey of Not Knowing, Julie Benezet writes, “The unknown shows up in many ways that we might not recognize. Not knowing is that empty space where the answer is not immediately in front of you. It is the pause in the conversation that you cannot immediately fill with anything that feels like a real answer. It is a moment where you are not sure where to go next. It is a yawning cavern of silence where all you might hear is self-doubt or skepticism. It is a sleepless night where you can only imagine bad outcomes.” ¹

The unknown is also the domain of spirit, because our minds are incapable of defining, understanding, and controlling the intelligence of the cosmos. And regardless of how clever we become in dissecting reality to determine how it works, we will never be able to fully comprehend that which made us. This doesn’t mean we will stop trying, nor that we should. But it could humble us and assure us that there is nothing wrong with being on the road to find out.

Our search for Truth will go on forever, just like the road that Bilbo Baggins sang about when he first left the Shire in Lord of the Rings:

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. ²

There’s peace in the realization that we will reach many destinations, way stations along the way, but that we will continue “ever on and on.” As T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The truth we seek is and always will be familiar, because what we actually long for is a deeper experience of Self. Not “self,” that body-centered personality with hopes for something better, but Self, the universal truth of who we are and have always been in oneness. This is the experience that we were born with and, before we die – perhaps not until our final moments – we will experience again, not as a discovery but a reunion. Then we will finally know that the truth we have been seeking is the truth of who we are and will always be, in the eternity of unfolding life, forever questing for something unknown.

References:
1. From The Journey of Not Knowing, by Julie Benezet
2. From Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien