The Quest

When I hear "the quest", I'm thinking of the quest for the Holy Grail — the Grail representing the ultimate destination: eternal life, salvation. Yet so many of our different quests are simply to fulfil our needs, however short-lived the pleasure and joy of it may be. So often we are lured towards a distraction we have not chosen, simply because our attention is pulled towards it.

I can only imagine that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the first humans looked up at the starry sky and wondered what this is, and who they are. The quest to understand is, in my opinion, directly linked to the fall from Eden — when we, for the first time, recognized ourselves to be naked, having a self-awareness of seeing ourselves as separate from the Garden. Since that time, prophets and teachers, masters and gurus have tried to put into words what they have experienced: unity consciousness, the oneness with everything. I guess many of them try to reverse engineer a path, or give guidance, or rules: "Know yourself." Which self are we talking about?

So many of us have heard that "Know thyself" was supposedly inscribed at the entrance of the Oracle at Delphi, a place people came to for answers. I find it interesting and curious that the Oracle itself asked the question back — or suggested that the answer to whatever question you might bring is to know thyself. A much less known anecdote I heard many years later: supposedly there was an inner sanctum to the Oracle, or to the Temple of Delphi, where a conclusion, a further insight into "Know Thyself", was given. Supposedly it said: "Know Thyself, and you will know God."

That intrigues me. Because if that was so, then we are God, or gods, and we can recognize our own divinity. That is the pursuit. That is the quest.

The Quest is also the name of my long-form conversation series.