Why Are We Searching?

 

Why Are We Searching?

I have always been fascinated by a simple question:

How much of reality do we really understand?

We live our lives surrounded by things that appear familiar. We see the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars. We see people, animals, trees and rivers. We touch things and hear sounds. We learn about the world through books, teachers and, increasingly, through computers and artificial intelligence.

We gradually begin to feel that we understand the world.

But do we?

The more I have thought about it, the more I have felt that human knowledge is rather like looking through a small window at something enormously larger than ourselves.6

We see something.

We understand something.

Then we discover that there is much more beyond what we have seen.

This thought led me to an old and beautiful story about blind men and an elephant.

Several blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. One touches its trunk and thinks it is like a snake. Another touches its leg and thinks it is like a tree. Another touches its side and thinks it is like a wall. Each describes the elephant according to what he has experienced.

Who is right?

In one sense, all of them.

In another sense, none of them has understood the whole elephant.

That little story has stayed with me because I began to wonder whether we too are like those blind men.

Perhaps each of us sees only a part of reality.

Science sees reality through observation and experiment.

Religion sees it through faith, scripture and spiritual experience.

Philosophy approaches it through reason.

A mystic may experience something that cannot easily be put into words.

And an ordinary person like me simply looks at the world and wonders.

Perhaps all of us are touching different parts of the same elephant.

But then comes the difficult question:

Where is the person who can see the whole elephant?

Perhaps there is no such person.

Perhaps the whole reality is simply too vast for any human being to grasp.

This book is not an attempt to claim that I have found the answer.

Far from it.

It began with questions.

Some came from science.

Some came from Indian philosophy.

Some came from poetry and spiritual traditions.

Some came from modern ideas about computers, information and artificial intelligence.

And some simply came from sitting quietly and wondering about things that most of us take for granted.

I do not know where these questions will finally lead us.

Perhaps nowhere.

Perhaps somewhere unexpected.

But I would like to make the journey.

And I would like the reader to make it with me.