Search Itself Changes You

"This whole planet is fiction," he said. "A picture show. Sometimes it can be a rather engrossing picture show, but that doesn't make it real. Our heads are programmed to get puffed up with all kinds of infatuations and obsessions. Some of them use up years and decades of our lives. Then when the spell breaks on one of ‘em you shake your head and wonder, ‘What was that, a bubble?’ But you turn right around and get obsessed by something else. Entire lives pass this way, from one petty obsession to another. Eventually, if you’re lucky and if one of these obsessions doesn’t kill you, you come to realize that life is at best a dream, and at worst, a nightmare." [...]

"The search itself changes you," Rose went on. "It transforms you. You start off by honestly acknowledging that you have a big problem: you don't know who you are, or where you came from, or where you're going after death. Most people spend their lives keeping themselves too distracted to think about this.

"But a few people get obsessed with knowing. Somewhere along the way they come to understand that the problem must be solved because there’s something enormous at stake. They are the ones who get the answer. They keep feeding the problem into their mental computer--knowing the computer can’t solve it, knowing that the only solution is a change of being."

"That kind of conviction is hard to come by," I said. I was actually startled by the sound of my own voice. I’d had no conscious forethought that I was going to speak.

Rose looked in my direction.

"You can't just hope that some day you'll have conviction. You create conviction by action. Action precedes conviction. Most people wait to be inspired to do something with their lives, when what they really need is to just get moving in some small way in a positive direction. That action will then result in the inspiration to perform increasingly larger and more beneficial actions. [...]

"The mistake people make is to wait for something to happen to them before they begin searching," he said. "They want the voice of God, or something, to tell them to get started. Or maybe they know they should be doing something but they procrastinate, hoping that tomorrow they'll have more conviction and be more determined. What they forget is there may be no tomorrow for them."

-- Richard Rose [more]