I am the Seeker Who Does Not Seek

For the longest time, I was looking for answers,

To philosophical questions.

Why are we here?

What is our purpose?

How should I live my life?

What is Good?

What should society aim for?

And I gradually found answers to some of these questions and more.

But the answers for one person do not necessarily satisfy the needs of all.

At some point, I became content with not knowing all I had wished to know.

Moreover, I accepted that I would never know those things.

I could seek true knowledge for this life and another life and another, and I will still want to know more.

And one thing I learned is that the pursuit of anything has no end, as one feels the need for more anyway.

If one has more power, one wants more.

If one has more love, one wants more.

If one has more money, one wants more.

And knowledge is no different.

I read enough books where each new one barely adds anything new to what I have already learned.

Asked enough questions to where each new one barely adds to the findings of a prior one.

Sought enough answers to know that anyone is willing to give them, making them worth little.

I was always the seeker, unsatisfied with my present knowledge, with the state of understanding of the people, books, and so forth.

And still, I am not satisfied with it, but I am content in knowing that I ventured to learn what I needed most and am working to do something with that.

Having come to know that I will never get to where I wanted to be, I still seek something, not knowing what it is.

I have sought to no longer seek, which is still seeking. Pursuing the end of all pursuits is still a pursuit.

Letting go of the need to seek or not seek, to pursue or not pursue, seems to be the path to somewhere. Like a wormhole that can transport you to another dimension, this may open up new paths we had not been aware of. When not focused on moving toward or away from something, there may be more energy to get through it.

This is a path rarely heard of and much more rarely taken.

Real Learning Comes Through Transformation

“Learning—real learning, wisdom—comes only when you are transformed. It is not an additive process—you cannot just go on adding knowledge to yourself. You will have to go through a transmutation that is hard.” – The Buddha Said… by Osho

I am only on the fifth chapter (out of 22) of The Buddha Said… and already I can see that this book carries great wisdom. It will be worth reading carefully, applying, and rereading, and reapplying. That is what I plan to do. The knowledge in this book could take time and effort to master, as it seems to guide us toward enlightenment.

The passage quoted above was insightful to me, yet it may appear quite obvious on its surface. I have found that most worthy wisdom is just that. It seems obvious and straightforward and often even easy to apply, yet very few of us do.

For example, I can tell you that getting impatient is bad. The next time someone is irritating you or provoking you, ignore it. Let it be. Take a breath and pay attention to something worthwhile in life.

Yet, for someone with the habit of impatience, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be lazy is bad. Do not waste this life. Go out and have the courage to find something that truly matters to you and that will make a difference in this world. Stop doing the bare minimum to get by and increase the standard you expect from yourself.

Yet, for someone with the habit of laziness, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be vengeful is bad. Stop wishing to get payback on all those that commit wrongs against you. In some cases, they are poisoned from having been wronged, making them want to wrong others. And in other cases, they don’t know the wrongs they commit and do so through a lack of awareness. Lastly, as we have all heard, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” so is this something we want to give energy to?

Yet, for someone with the habit of vengeance, will they listen and change?

As you may guess, I find it unlikely that the person with a habit of something will suddenly change their life from being exposed to mere words.

Despite that I work as a writer and earn my living this way, it is painful to admit that the words themselves are empty if they don’t cause personal transformation. The learning, the knowledge, the wisdom, the teachings—all of it is empty, useless, and fruitless if we do not change from within.

Yet I have seen, as you have seen, that most of us know the right things to do, to be, to say, and yet fail to do them. Perhaps we need to come to the awareness more deeply that the only worthwhile learning was not in the accumulation of knowledge, facts, or even the pursuit of higher understanding.

Rather, the only worthwhile learning was in whether we could become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions. Awareness is not enough—to be aware is to see that something is happening. But to see it and do nothing seems to be a massive failure, worse than not having seen it at all.

If you see a wall and walk into it, isn’t that somehow worse than someone who never saw the wall and walked into it accidentally?

We must become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions.

The point is to do something with all the accumulation of knowledge and facts. Otherwise, the learning was useless. This is not something we hear often.

I am a big believer in education and learning. But what we often forget is that as humans, what we learn should be causing some change within us. And that change within us should cause some change in the real world.

In a similar vein, Mahatma Gandhi said:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

If I read the tragic history of a people, and then I live my life normally, without my heart having grown, giving to charity, or learning more about their present-day struggles, then what have I truly learned?

If I “learn” by acquiring facts, and change nothing, then isn’t that a personal failing?

Yet, the point of this post is not to make us all feel guilty for anything we ever learned, where we failed to convert it into some positive action. The point is to see that we need to be brave and encourage these personal changes to happen.

I have seen many highly educated people increase their learning and awareness while failing to grow at all. I’ve been guilty of this too.

How much time do we spend reading the news versus actually doing something about the world's tragedies?

How much time do we spend educating our children about “the real world” while denying them the ability actually to participate in it?

And how much do we consume books or media while not producing something worthy in return?

Having written this post up to here, I believe you probably already knew everything I just stated. So if we already knew, why haven’t we committed to acquiring more helpful ideas and performing more actions that could help us change more profoundly?

The reason is that we fear change. Even for those who want progress, it still can feel scary or overwhelming to make a significant change.

But we don’t need to make massive changes in every area of our lives, suddenly.

We can decide on certain things that we find to be important and then invest ourselves into them.

I use the word invest because when you invest, you risk losing something. Your risk may be that you hope to help improve something, and in the end, you don’t make much of an impact. Then you may be let down or upset. But of course, we have to be willing to risk losing something to make our impact.

The outcomes we desire are never guaranteed. There is always a risk. We need to choose which risks are worth taking, where we can hope to gain a worthy experience that transforms us.

I think we fear changes because we tend to fear death. Change is the death of something old and the birth of something new. However, why should we fear it? We can guide the change in our lives by moving away from those things that do not work, which are not fruitful, and moving toward the ones that are.

We may find that the greatest life lessons come from the most significant changes within us or around us. Yet great changes imply some form of loss, which again is what we fear. We must become comfortable with the idea of losing something (or someone) if we ever wish to gain anything that truly matters.

We cling even to the things that don’t do us much good because they are familiar. They make us feel at home. But sometimes, that home is worth letting go of, to introduce something that compels us to grow.

In the end, we will lose our lives and everything we ever gained. All of that was temporary. But if we work on transforming ourselves, we will leave a permanent impact on the people around us and on the universe itself.

The universe is not static—it is ever-evolving and changing. Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The key lesson of the day is that we should continue to learn. But for that learning to be worth something, we should be ready and willing to change from within. This can mean seeing the world in a new way, feeling in a new way, and then deciding to stop doing something we used to do—and doing something in a way that we never did before.

We have not truly learned unless we have been transformed from the inside.

As a practical tip, after you read something or learn something, ask yourself:

What has truly changed?

If nothing, then ask:

What can I change, and should I change, given what I just learned?

The Pursuit of Higher Understanding

Pursuing information and knowledge is good, but pursuing wisdom and understanding is better. The world we live in is overflowing with information. More and more websites, books, music, social media posts, shows, and so forth are being pumped out into the world day by day to absurd levels where we cannot keep up with it all. Even keeping up with one medium is quite difficult. There are too many books to read, too many shows to watch, and too much music to listen to.

Foolishly, many of us do aim to keep up with it. We feel that if we don't know some piece of information, then we will be left behind. At this point in human history, we have data that, to some extent, are immortal and indestructible. As with the cloud and internet, the data may live on forever. At the same time, the data is quite mortal because every time something new comes out, only moments later hundreds, or thousands, or more even newer and fresh productions are released, pushing the recently created ones out of our reach and out of our minds, deeper into our collective forgotten histories.

In this sense, Twitter seems to be a metaphor for our relationships with information. What is new becomes old almost immediately, goes out of reach, and then is forgotten. We are forever grasping for the new, but the new instantly becomes old. So our information and ideas always appear to be outdated.

Many of us are shouting louder and louder to bring attention to what we are doing, while people care less and less because there is so much new stuff out there all of the time. There are more and more bits of information floating around for us all to see and access, but most people lack direction and purpose for what we are supposed to do with this information. We mostly ignore the information, or it paralyzes us with fear, or we are perpetually talking about what is new and following the fads and trivializing this life. Still, either way, the information is either worthless or not properly utilized. We are silly in that we value this information so much that we are always chasing it.

For what? Knowledge without know-how is what? Awareness without action is what? Data without direction is what?

Ignorance. Futility. Emptiness.

We are hyper-connected and disconnected at the same time. We are so into our devices, always connected to the digital world but lost from the real world in front of us. The real world has become a mirage that seems less real than the digital world that we prefer to inhabit. That digital world makes us feel useful because we are addicted to information. We must know what new recipe our neighbor is trying out to impress her mother-in-law. We must know which asteroid is almost coming to hit the planet and end it all. We must know which major attack happened without cause. It just happened. We must know these things and yet can do nothing about them but grow more and more upset and discontent with this limited life we have.

The information is limitless, but we are limited in our time. We limit ourselves by focusing on the information itself as something to be valued, rather than what we will do with that information to make improvements. We must value true wisdom and understanding over the 0s and 1s of data and information. Wisdom and understanding transcend the information before it and will help us to rise and do something greater in this world.

How do we pursue wisdom and understanding? Daydream, write down our thoughts, start conversations with and listen to our elders, distance ourselves from the frenetic pace of modern life where everything must be done right away. We must be in a hurry and busy and worried, or we are not normal, and something is wrong with us. Be artistic, observe nature, people-watch, meditate, read from enlightened souls and classical works, and not just the new fad.

It is important that we not pursue trivial and temporary factoids and instead pursue practical knowledge that can have a true impact on our thoughts and actions. If we pursue enough of this kind of knowledge, it will lead to higher levels of wisdom and understanding.