Our seeking mind and our yearning heart

“True loss is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self.”

Sometime ago, I read a book titled “Portals to Freedom” by Howard Colby Ives and found this paragraph incredibly beautiful. So I’d like to share it with you here:

“Men are wandering in the wilderness of Time and Space, caught in the net of circumstances, befooled by the illusions of sense. They are not aware of this, and that ignorance constitutes the tragedy of life.

Nevertheless, they long above all else to escape that wilderness in which they wander so forlorn. Under the pressure of this instinctive yearning they experiment with every path which offers the slightest hope of freedom. To the vast majority, that escape seems easiest along the path of what they call pleasure. To others fame and power beckon, saying: “follow me and I will give you in the adulation of the world that respite from self for which you long.”

To still others the refuge lies in the realms of intellect. In extending the barriers of nature; in probing into the microscopic universe; in breaking down the atom and bombarding the electron; in sweeping inter-stellar space with powerful and ever more powerful telescopes, -- all are seeking, though they know it not, for Him who is in their very heart of hearts, “closer than their own identity.” Inherently, fundamentally, essentially, inescapably dissatisfied with all the contingent world can offer, they yet seek to find within its scope that answer to their questing soul and mind without which they can never find rest. They know instinctively that they must escape the self and so they seek, in flying from it to the world around them, the refuge from its grasp for which they yearn. Their longing is for an eternal Home, for the knowledge and love of God, but they know this not.”

What a tragedy, I often think, if we live our whole life without ever knowing who we truly are, and why we live, why we die.