Bernd’s weekly blog No.8 : The Quest

Hi everybody!

Time to talk about a very important, I would say vital, topic…

The Quest.

Let’s take a look at the basic Oxford Dictionary definition of this term:

“a long or arduous search for something.”

Having a quest, in modern terms, involves having a certain aspect of life, or goal, or desire, at the centre of your life, and putting everything else you are involved in secondary to that, even in service to that. Actually you would be hard pressed to find anyone living an inspired and inspiring life not already questing!

Perhaps your quest is to become a billionaire. This would mean, if you are to have any chance of success, that you would devote all the resources you have available to you to head in that direction. Achieving such a goal is obviously not going to just land in your lap by sitting around, hoping for that fortuitous billion to suddenly land in your bank account. A long and arduous search will need to be made.

Something to consider at this juncture is the quality of your quest. You could say there is a kind of quest hierarchy in terms of the choices we make. Is your quest purely to do with personal gain? This isn’t a terrible place to be! It is certainly going to be a more engaging life if you have a purely material desire you are questing for, as opposed to simply floating around, lost and unfocused. However, as has been noted by countless luminaries throughout human history, when we finally attain our longed for material hope and wish, we inevitably realise we are still empty inside.

A level up on the quest hierarchy involves having a mission where we try to achieve something good for the world. For example, perhaps you have a quest to create a charity based school for underprivileged children in a country that doesn’t provide free education. This quest will take all the effort you have at your disposal, and you would, just as in the earlier example, need to build your life around it. Since the effort involved is altruistic, the situation is already a great deal more satisfying than the above billionaire example.

According to the yogi, the only quest ultimately worth giving your entire life to (and beyond, if you can conceive of such a thing) is liberation itself. This is the attempt to free yourself from all delusion, all suffering, and come to a true and everlasting connection to true reality, without anything keeping you back and away from a deep understanding of the way things are. This is a state commonly named “enlightenment” in modern circles.

This is my quest. 

Everything in my life is seen through this lens, and my choices are based on whether something is going to help me on this quest, or get in the way of it. I refuse to be quagmired in lesser aims and attempts, although of course I do at times become lost and confused, until I wake up from my materialistic dreams and return to a life that actually brings me ever closer to my long cherished liberation attempt. 

The reason that yogis have always taught that this is the ultimate quest for all of us is that it is both the highest possibility for you as a human being to attain, AND will give the most to the world of suffering beings. If a non liberated person acts, the actions will always be tainted and not true to the needs of each exact situation, whereas a liberated human, free from the cycle of birth and death, not only lives in perpetual bliss and ecstasy, but is actually able to see in each moment what best would serve this particular flavour of suffering, and act accordingly. 

I am aware that these are grandiose claims, and I certainly would not expect you to believe them, or subscribe to them in any way. However, it is my fervent wish that at least one of you reading these words will feel a little gateway of possibilities open up deep in your heart, and be curious enough to see where this journey can actually take you.

One way that I can give you a taste of this ultimate quest is to lay out one example of a path in front of you. This is what I intend to do over the coming weeks. Using the formula of the eight limbs of yoga, a system codified rather a long time ago by the great yogi Patanjali, I will, week by week, do my best to explain and show how the yogi’s journey might look.

The journey begins with the yamas and niyamas, the first two limbs of yoga. These are essentially the preparation limbs for yoga before we dive into the actual practises themselves, and I will be using the expanded list given by Carandas and Yajnavalkya. More on that next week!

In the meantime, do consider this… do you have a quest? If you don’t, what are you deeply yearning for in your heart of hearts? If you do already have one, is it worthy of you?

With boundless love to you all!

Bernd.