Monday, January 25, 2016

Seeking the Unknown, part 3

The seeker is addicted to life.  Life in its wondrous, uncertain, surprising, mysterious, spontaneous, natural flow.  Death is certainty, and the seeker abhors the absoluteness of both.

Both the seeker and the ambitious love life, but while the ambitious is afraid of danger and unpredictability, the seeker is afraid of safety and certainty.  The ambitious seeks to create and sustain a narrative for his life.  The ambitious man wants to direct life.  The seeker wants to break free of narratives.  The seeker wants for life to direct him.

A physical jail will be painful for both, but a loss in reputation will be exhilarating to the seeker while debilitating for the ambitious.  The seeker revels in rebellion, while the ambitious abhors it.  The ambitious seeks to profit from the conditions that he finds around himself.  The seeker, not interested in profit, wants to create new conditions which can lead to new experiences.

The seeker converts the unknown to the known, and then moves on to a further unknown.  He lifts the veil, and having found the secret, considers it a secret no more.  Hence he is no longer entranced.  The seeker is in love with the veil, because the veiled is significant only because of it being veiled.  The unveiled holds no interest for the seeker.

The seeker is addicted to life, to movement, to the future.  His mind is the arrow shooting through time, piercing veil after veil, and there is never an end to the eternity that lies in front of him.  For a seeker, a life of a thousand years will be the same as that of a hundred: Unsatisfying.  The seeker dies thirsty.

The seeker seeks to find, but he abhors those that say they have found.  What have they found?  Have they found the future?  They have only found something that is now a memory.  They can relive that memory, relive and recreate that ecstasy or feeling, but the true seeker is forever transcending.  The future is forever the unknown, and the seeker forges ahead.

The seeker is addicted to climbing the endless topography of life.  The seeker may or may not seek a higher peak than one he has experienced, but he will seek a different terrain.  He will not stay on a peak for long.  He will climb down from it, to go somewhere else.

The seeker, if stuck in a shallow pool, will flap and flail.  He will create disturbance so that he is either ejected from the pool, or the pool becomes complex and muddied.  A seeker is a troublemaker.

Children are seekers, and some whose seeking is crushed completely by fear and violence seek only certainty and safety.  But there are those too, whose soul awaits its season of breaking free from its caverns of darkness.  Into the light of mystery, into life.

The law, the machinery, the regulation by the modern state, the control of nature, are music to the ears of the ambitious, but are death knells to the child within the man.  The child seeks to reach for the sun, to touch the stars, to play with fire, to look at the ant and to talk to the bird.  The child is nature: wild and as yet untamed.  And the man that the child becomes is the tame shadow of itself.

The seekers are children in a world of men.

(to be continued)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What of those whose thirst is embedded with sands of custom,ceremony,order...you begin seeing yourself a misfit in either world.