71. The Need To See

We ordinarily expect to be able to understand our experiences. If an experience is incomprehensible, we want to understand why. We expect there to be a reason and if one is not readily available, we start to look for it.

In some cases, our search lasts only a few seconds, especially if we realize the answer is unimportant. But more often, what is not understood is intriguing enough to trigger our curiosity, leading us to expend some effort looking for an explanation. We try to gather context and clues that might reveal the nature of the thing in question. We read texts that clarify but also pose further questions, and so we read even more to try to locate reliable answers.

Sometimes we search so frequently that our search expands and transforms into a general aspiration to understand. Our concern stops being limited to single instances of incomprehension and broadens to include everything. We now feel compelled to develop a more general and encompassing awareness of the world around us.

Because this aspiration is really only the hope for greater understanding, we do not despair when our search faces setbacks. We are no longer operating from a desire to know but from the need to see. New discoveries that complicate our understanding are not frustrations but rather encouragements towards the possibility of something even greater than our wildest imaginings. We examine and explore everything, not with the expectation of quenching a thirst or uncovering ultimate truths, but because the search has become part of us. It is who we are and what we are — observing beings within the world’s being.

For someone with this aspiration, a fragment of text discovered in the world is a provocation. It is a call to action, to investigate how this fragmentary part relates to the whole. It is a call to discover the world in yourself, to see the whole in the parts, together and separate, in time and in eternity.