“What is the Point of Life?” – I was recently asked this question and the quote of Niels Bohr came immediately to mind: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” This is equally true of the true nature of life. Life, beneath the surface, is truly shocking.
Life is a quest. It is a sojourn to self-knowledge and truth. However, truth only appears to those who actively and consciously seek it. It is hidden from the uninitiated, though always in plain sight. Even when the initiated attempt to share some of the insights they have gleaned from their own experiences, most people cannot accept it or internalize it, in the same way that giving a person a manual of all the rules, strategies and game plays of water polo, just reading it would not equip them with the ability to play the game.
The most crucial aspect of the quest is that it is experiential, because nothing is really true for us until we have experienced it. This explains why all the so-called scientific, empirical data about the world ultimately has little impact on our personal and interior lives. If we have experienced something all the scientific studies and all the most highly qualified scientists cannot persuade us otherwise. It also explains the ineffectuality of bible thumpers on street corners. If we could transform our consciousness just by reading a book we would all be enlightened beings. The quest to understanding is a process whereby knowledge is transformed, through experience, to wisdom.
Every quest is individual, clearly, but there are some common elements:
1) The quest usually begins with profound loss. Although it is possible to begin the quest without loss, in the vast majority of cases it is not until we are forced to abandon all that we believe to be true about ourselves and the world that we can begin to open up to the shocking truth. And the truth is shocking because we are not educated in the true nature of life. Our education, acculturation and socialization process are mainly concerned with the physical world alone and the paradoxical nature of existence means that the appearance of things in the physical world can be deeply misleading. It is only when we are prepared to look, freely, fearlessly, and with an open mind, beneath the surface of things that we can begin to glimpse the true nature and purpose of life.
2) The quest requires that we will be confronted with experiences which will cause us to face our deepest fears. When we push through our fears with conscious awareness and intention, we approach the vantage point whereby we can begin to see their true insubstantiality.
3) We must be prepared to accept with equanimity, and to continue to venture on undiscouraged and undeterred, through all the events, circumstances and experiences our life quest presents to us, knowing they all contain precious nuggets of insight that we need for further progress. It is only with complete and utter acceptance that we demonstrate our readiness for progress, and our worthiness to receive future insights, so that the time and energy wasting process of casting pearls before swine is avoided.
4) Once we gain sufficient insight and understanding into our true nature, and that of life, we are then required to live according to those principles that have been revealed to us. With sufficient mastery we are then endowed with the requirement to love all life more consistently and more perfectly, and to be a living example of the wisdom we have gained.
To get some idea of this process of the quest, a book and a film are recommended. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho describes beautifully what the quest can look like and how it works. The movie Batman Begins is a wonderful depiction of the stages as I have described them: loss; the facing of our fears; mastery; and finally sharing and role- modeling.
