Discovery Is the Nature of the Soul
The presence of a person who has stillness and contentment of heart engenders trust. They can sift from the chaff of talk and select what has weight and worth. Sometimes the dignity of their composure can bring the company of those present to a finer level of attention and worthiness. Conversely, you become uneasy in the presence of someone whose stillness and contentment are forced. Their composure only endures because it operates within a very limited frame of self-protection and denial. It is difficult to feel that you can be yourself in the company of such efficiently quelled longing. When you open your heart to discovery, you will be called to step outside the comfort barriers within which you have fortified your life. You will be called to risk old views and thoughts and to step off the circle of routine and image. This will often bring turbulence. The pendulum will fix at times on one extreme, and you will be out of balance. But your soul loves the danger of growth. In its own wise trust, your soul will always return you to a place of real and vital equilibrium.
The very nature of the universe invites you to journey and discover it. The earth wants our minds to listen attentively and gaze wisely so that we may learn its secrets and name them. We are the echo-mirrors of contemplative Nature. One of our most sacred duties is to be open and faithful to the subtle voices of the universe which come alive in our longing. Aristotle said that the reason we can know anything is that there is a morphic affinity between us and Nature; this is the intimate and precise affinity of form. Animals, trees, fields, and tides have other duties. For this alone have we been freed and blessed. Either we are in the universe to inhabit the lovely eternity of our souls and grow real, or else we might as well dedicate our days to shopping and kill time watching talk shows.
Life as a Pilgrimage of Discovery
Ideally, a human life should be a constant pilgrimage of discovery. The most exciting discoveries happen at the frontiers. When you come to know something new, you come closer to yourself and to the world. Discovery enlarges and refines your sensibility. When you discover something, you transfigure some of the forsakenness of the world. Nature comes to know itself anew in your discoveries. Creative human thought adds to the brightness of the world. Yet there is a strong seam of thought which has always de-animated nature and reduced the earth to a mere playground for the worst fantasies of human greed. Why is this? Such blind and destructive perception is often secretly driven by guilt. There is profound but subtle cosmological guilt in human beings. We even communicate guilt to our dogs! Yet the animal world often offers images of pure discovery. My neighbour’s pony had a beautiful brown foal early in the spring. In the first days, she followed her mother awkwardly on the uneven ground with her long, new, gangly legs. One afternoon as they were both lying down, the new foal got up and moved away on her own a little more confidently, and then more swiftly with every step. Then, suddenly, she found she could move faster, and then she discovered that she could run. It was a marvelous sight. She started to run so swiftly and gracefully, her head held high, circling round and round the stony field. She was utterly ecstatic at the discovery of her new swiftness. She would come back time and again and halt before her mother as if to say: “Hey see what I can do.” Each one of us has made a huge discovery that we have never gotten over. This is the discovery of the world. Our first journey was the journey to the earth and we are still travelling.
The First Journey Creates the Traveller
We are always on a journey from darkness into light. The journey from anonymity to intimacy is one we continually travel. Indeed, the human self, both body and mind, arrives in the world through this journey. We come out of anonymity into light. By some strange destiny, seeds engage each other in the darkness of the womb. It is startling that the infinite intimacy of the human person begins in this unknown encounter between two individuals. Our parents set us on this journey when they make love and conceive us. We forget that our very conception emerged out of the passionate act of their longing for each other. It is no surprise that we are filled with desire. Each of us is literally a child of longing. On its journey to humanity, the embryo actually travels through all the shapes of evolution. Each of these embryonic shapes becomes ever more personal until the blur of forms finally clarifies as the baby’s body, and the intimacy of a human countenance emerges. It is no wonder that we have such hunger to belong. The very formation of our tiny bodies as babies was itself a journey of the most precarious longing.
Already in you as a little dot of presence, some powerful longing knew how to guide original belonging to undertake the journey from nowhere towards the intimacy of becoming an individual with your own world within. Usually on a journey you leave a point and travel through a place until you arrive at an intended destination. Your journey into this planet was different from any other journey you will ever make. The journey actually created the one who travelled and created the inner landscape of mind and soul of the traveller. The elemental metamorphosed into the human. This is an instance of the astounding symmetry in Nature. The inner sphere of the womb mirrors and completes the outer journey of evolution. There was some ancient pre-conscious sense of belonging alive in you which already felt enough connection with the mother to start on this dangerous path. Nothing remained the same. All the changes happened in the blind darkness, and the transition to each new stage entailed such complete transformation. The depth and poignant consistency of your hunger to belong can be traced to this forgotten journey between the worlds.
In the womb something inside you already knew you were growing towards belonging. The hunger to belong is not merely a desire to be attached to something. It is rather sensing that great transformation and discovery become possible when belonging is sheltered and true. Belonging is a call to integrity and creativity. The structure of this call illuminates the very nature of belonging. The first belonging is to the body of the mother. Only when desire and destiny help realize this belonging does the embryo grow into self-identity and reach the threshold of belonging to itself. This first belonging is a blind and vulnerable struggle. It is a secret growth in the darkness. Without this primal longing to belong, no individual could ever come into being. When we normally think about people, we inevitably forget that each person actually grew out of this original impulse to belong. This pre-conscious longing grew to become the mind, body, and spirit of a person. This belonging was not a static, fixed attachment. It was alive with desire and the wish to become the one you dreamed.
Even as a little micro-essence of tissue you cling internally to the mother until you develop your own body to cross the next threshold into the distance-filled world. Despite all the scientific inventions that can provide information on the unborn child, the truth is, the really important things remain unknown. Something within you already knows the infinities that lie in wait outside the mother and recognizes that the only way of traversing them is to become a body. To be born is an incredible event, a great disturbance. You are cast out; thrown from the cave into the light. It is interesting that your first moment of experience is a moment of disturbance. In its abrupt dislocation, birth already holds the echo of death. The rhythm of this moment prefigures the subsequent rhythm of your life: parting and coming together. There can be no union without separation, no return without parting. No belonging is permanent. To live a creative and truthful life, it is vital to learn the art of being separate and the generosity of uniting.