I have always desired something so completely it drove my every movement. I sensed it was just beneath the surface of my familiar life; that I could reach out and touch it if I could see it. Though it was hidden from view, I somehow knew it was inevitable.
In my earliest years ‘it’ was something I wanted to say, so I carried around a notebook and captured every thought that came to mind. But as I grew, it twisted into greed, status, and narcissism. I became convinced that it was my own greatness that I desired, and I loudly proclaimed it to all who would listen.
The greatness I had imagined never materialized. Cracks of self-doubt allowed the seeds of a new perspective to take root. The opening widened until I encountered ‘God’ in a spiritual epiphany that transformed my life. One moment the word ‘God’ was something I could not make sense of, and the next moment it was all that made sense. I finally knew what I had always wanted: God.
I renounced my materialist ambitions, abandoned dreams I had been chasing for years, and abruptly left the only home I had ever known to find and live with God. Sequestered away in a remote Himalayan village, I searched day and night for the path. Over years of isolation, I concluded that God is the desire for peace. It was peace I had always desired.
But how would I find peace? I concentrated on finding a universal truth that would guide me forward. I was obsessed with connecting the hard sciences with metaphysics, imagining that the answer would surely reveal the path. But despite the clarity of my revelations, I was bogged down in contemplative minutiae, unable to find a practical way forward.
I had tied my pursuit of peace to the worldview of the establishment I had renounced. I had no realistic way of tying together all of these disparate disciplines into a single, cohesive framework. I began to suspect that contradiction, and question my assumption that I would need a ‘truth’ of this nature in order to find peace.
It would remain unresolved, as I was feeling the pinch of financial uncertainty, and it was affecting my contemplations. After years without an income, I was unable to support myself and I reluctantly returned to the life I had renounced, promising myself that I would return to the path of peace to finish my work.
For over a decade I toiled, creating a successful company. My worldly ambitions surged. But just beneath the confident surface was a deep and growing dissatisfaction. I ignored the pain until it all broke, falling further than I had ever before, losing everything I valued. Most importantly, my confidence was shattered, and I knew I did not have the strength to get back up again.
The pain was excruciating, and my darkest hours extended over a year. My days were spent fantasizing about permanent release. Occasionally, that promise I made to myself as a young man – that I would resume my path – would edge into my mind. But I was so consumed by my losses I could not see a way forward.
Then, one evening I woke from sleep fixated on a thought: the purpose of my life is to get back to where I came from. It was a reminder. I was not entirely out of the dark, but from that point forward I began to rediscover the younger man’s desire for peace. Slowly I resumed my quest, this time with the wisdom that comes with age and disappointment.
Where the younger man got stuck in the details over a decade earlier, the older man saw a way forward with a simple, unasked question: what do I actually know? With the precision of an engineer, I circled back to the beginning of my inquiry, turning up the questions I had never asked myself before.
I could clearly see where I had gone wrong before. I was focused on finding the truth in everything I had ever learned; an impossible feat. I could spend my entire lifetime searching without making any progress. This time around, I focused on figuring out what I actually knew and starting from there, rather than starting with all of the things I didn’t know.
I threw out questions that did not have a clear cut way to answer them, and eventually found the first question: Where am I?
Surprisingly, I could not answer that basic question. I could only repeat what I had been told by other people. I woke up here one day nearly forty years ago and never figured out myself where I was. I found my answer: I don’t know where I am. Therefore, I am lost.
That answered my next question: Why am I in pain? I am in pain because I’m lost.
My third question to myself followed naturally: what do I want? I do not want to be in pain anymore. I want peace. With this line of inquiry I had established an entire back-story to my quest nearly two decades before.
I am lost. I am in pain. And I want peace. With these three knowns, I had the beginnings of a framework.
The profundity of these simple assertions changed everything. I repeated it hundreds of times per day, searching for the gaps. But my conviction grew until my behavior reflected a person who was lost rather than a person conducting an intellectual exercise.
Once I understood my circumstances, I said, now what?
It was then that I began to separate what I directly knew from what I did not and could never know. With that, I began to make progress where I had been stuck over a decade earlier.
Then it became clear that the source of my acute pain was this state of being lost. I am lost. I am in pain. And I want peace. These three statements
I wasn’t lost because my business failed. I realized that I had always been lost because I woke up somewhere and never knew why or where I was. That was the source of my pain, and so I wanted to go Home. With this realization, I was able to create a practical framework that I could live by.
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