by SEG

Created on: May 07, 2008   Last Updated: August 31, 2011

Our quest to understand Truth and Meaning in life begins before we even learn to walk; it's natural for us to propel ourselves around ‘seeking’ and this self-propelled inquisitiveness becomes more complex and intricately directed the older we get.

The day I first formed an idea of a specific ‘mission’ in life is still very clear in my memory. Relaxing in a grassy schoolyard one day, I watched with the visions of children scenes of racing chariots and horses infused with lumbering elephants and monsters, all drifting languidly across the sky in puffy white clouds.

The unsophisticated reality of childhood is a mystifying experience at times regarding what is real and what isn't in the world around us.  And that mystery deepens with a growing awareness of the differences between how we each perceive the world and each other.

Standing within our individual subjective reality, the fluid nature of Truth can sometimes flow between two people like a phantom river between distant worlds.

As an eleven-year-old boy this subjectivity was a prominent mystery for me in itself; a sometimes confusing avalanche of contradiction and even outright fabrications. This was a puzzle that prompted me to vow to myself that day… no matter how long it took, if it was the last thing I ever did in this life "I'm going to figure out what's going on here."

The quest had begun in earnest.

But I didn't begin a lifelong journey of understanding fueled with noble thoughts of finding some ultimate Truth and Meaning; only with the intent of sorting out and making sense of a baffling world perceived through the eyes of a child.

It seemed like such a simple goal then.

But the scope of life isn't as small as it seemed then because the more we see from the looking, the larger and more complex the picture becomes. Compounding this, the quest to understand the riddle of living is just as complex when directed inward as it is when looking outward.

Out into the galaxies, beyond time and into a seemingly infinite reality our probing minds can fly, but the inevitable subjective differences between our individual visions leads us back to our self: looking into ourselves is an attempt to understand the fluid nature of the Perceiver of this flowing Perceived.

And looking within ourselves the infinite potentials in the world around us reflects like a hall of mirrors back down into our own unknown depths.

This is the nature of our individual life: a quest for understanding, purpose and meaning within a deepening mystery we call the reality around and the reality within; a reality zigzagging between us.

Within the fields of our individual ‘self’- our splendid human minds- our mission in life is to plumb those depths despite the fact that in all probability, we will never fully "… figure out what's going on here…"

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