The Futility Of Looking For Truth
Updated: Jun 6, 2022
Truth does not need to be found. It does not belong to people, books, or ancient manuscripts. Nothing can contain it. It was here before both books and humans. It was here before Earth. What belong to books and man are concepts, symbols, names, categories, forms, interpretations, summaries, etc. The grandeur of truth far surpasses what you can find in books, YouTube videos, and lectures.
It is futile to hunt for truth. The quest for truth cannot be undertaken intentionally. Intention, having emerged from the self, reinforces it. In turn, it cages you inside the self, the bubble of which creates a fake personal (egoistic) reality. The quest for truth, however, is more like sleep. You disappear into it and forget about yourself. Only the experience stays. When you wake up, you realize that you will never be able to explain the experience, for words and concepts are too primitive to convey it. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao (from Tao Te Ching).
Hunting for truth creates focus. Focus implies a negligent rejection of all that is not the object of focus. Such focus is, thus, blinding. Under focus, people often miss what they were looking for because it emerged outside the periphery of focus. Moreover, what lies outside the object of focus is infinite. Thus, you ignore the entire happening because you were focused. I suggest you try not to focus too much. Don't worry too much about finding the truth. Allow yourself a nonchalance non-focus to experience truth when you find yourself disappearing into it. Truth must come to you. When it does, you must be ready to accept and experience it by NOT being ready, by virtue of non-doing. Understand that non-focus is equally important as focus.
Burn all books. Destroy all libraries. Truth will still exist. This tells us that truth does not live in books. Books merely approximate some of it.