Search and Discovery
What am I looking for?
We come to an inquiry with regard to the spiritual from a want, a lack of something. What this “something” is we are not sure. We simply know that we are missing something; and our failures in our search to fulfill this lack seem to have only made it grow larger.
At some point, for the luckiest of those who sense this lack, which cannot be filled anywhere within our world, we somehow find ourselves picking up a book, hearing a lecture, or browsing a website we have discovered addresses this mysterious lack.
At first, our investigation into this plethora of information seems disjointed, unrelated to our lack, and as a rule, totally and completely confusing. Yet the truly persistent of us, the ones where this lack is the greatest, continue to delve deeper and deeper. “What am I to get out of all of this data? Why does it draw me? What is within this information that will assist me in fulfilling this lack, this need, where all my other searches have failed?” Of course, the real question is “What exactly am I looking for?”
A hint to the answer of this question is hidden within our own experiences—as children and as parents. If we think back to when we were a child, we instantly recall wonderful memories of days where our only concern was with what manner of play we will fill our day. Perhaps a bike ride followed by meeting with young friends at a park and exploring the wonderful tools of play there will be our choice. Or maybe our parents will take us somewhere special. What child cannot remember their first trip to the zoo? Then again, perhaps we will just remain indoors and play with some of the games and toys they have purchased for us.
But if we compare our feelings of these experiences to our feelings as parents watching our children in the same situations, albeit the toys have changed a bit, our perspective is dramatically different. We see that bike ride as exercise and a way to release that pent up energy for our children. We see their meeting with friends at the park as a way to develop the social skills they will need later in life. A trip to the zoo provides wonderful knowledge that there is an entire world yet unexplored. And those games and toys they play with indoors were carefully chosen to help develop their cognitive processes which will provide vast benefit when they begin going to school.
Our memories of our own childhood carry no reminiscence of what was happening behind the scenes of our fun filled days. Nor do we relate those memories to the incredible value each of those experiences played in our own personal development. As children, we simply wanted to “have fun,” to play and enjoy—to receive pleasure. But if we stop a moment and compare these situations we experienced with what we now know as parents, we discover that each and every experience we had as a child was purpose filled to help guide us and direct us toward developing into an adult.
But what if that same circumstance existed right now with all of us, as “adults”? Do we not basically do the same things today as the child? Are we not seeking ways to please ourselves, fill ourselves daily with pleasures of all varieties? If we look at the hardships we face each day as the same hardships a child faces everyday, the search for ways to enjoy either this moment or some future moment, we begin to realize we are really no different than the child we were years ago.
Granted the sources of pleasure have changed from a bike ride to enjoying good health, from playing at the park with our friends to enjoying the vast choices of entertainment with our adult friends, from a trip to the zoo to those wonderful vacations, and from those toys and games we played with to our educations that help us earn a living as adults. Of course, adults do not relate such “adult” matters to the same level as their children, but at the end of the day, there really is no difference.
But let’s return to that lack we first spoke of, the one that caused us to begin our search and investigation. If we observe our children and their development, there is another desire we see that begins to develop. It usually manifests as our children beginning to mimic adults in various actions. The fireman’s son might put on his dad’s shoes and fireman’s hat, and then play games as if he were the fireman. The doctor’s daughter might have her own doctor’s play kit filled with toys that allows her to pretend to be just like her mother, the physician. What is really happening here is that the child is beginning to discover a totally new desire, the desire to be an adult, to want to grow up.
Just like that child who begins to discover this most important of desires, we too experience a desire, a lack for this identical thing. Now this lack cannot be fulfilled with our normal toys and games, the adult versions, for the pleasures those toys and games bring do not fulfill this lack. This desire has to do with something that is just as foreign to us as the cognitive development of a child playing with toys and games that never realizes the games’ true purpose.
From a spiritual point of view, we are all children, playing with our toys and games called our corporeal life, totally ignorant of our spiritual parents that are helping us to develop. But when one begins to sense this lack, a lack that was not originally present from our birth, a lack that cannot be fulfilled with our adult “toys and games,” one is beginning to discover the desire to grow up into an adult—spiritually.
What does this mean? As children, we were born with a desire to receive pleasure. That is simply all we knew. And we constantly searched for ways to fulfill this desire. But out of nowhere, this new desire appears within a child, the desire to be like daddy or mommy, the desire to want to grow up, to be an adult.
As adults we remain within that desire to receive pleasure; and all of our actions are guided by it until that moment when, just like a child, we discover that we want to grow up. We have been given toys and games to play with by an unseen parent, a spiritual parent, in order to help develop us. Yet when we discover this desire to be like this unseen parent, what we are sensing is a desire to do what this mysterious parent does—to bestow. We discover that to attain this attribute of our “spiritual parent” called bestowal is to become a true adult, a spiritual adult. And then, just as the child who begins the process of becoming a corporeal adult, we begin the process of becoming a spiritual adult. What have we actually discovered? We have discovered who we really are and the true purpose for which we exist.