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.
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.
